The
Golden Rule in 19th-Century South Carolina: Labor People and their Parallel
Government

This
study is about the golden rule. In the 19th century, southern capital used a
"divide-and-conquer strategy" based on racism in its attempts to keep
black and white labor down. Southern labor responded with a class unity
strategy. Illustrative was Thomas Coghlan's admonition, "Do unto others as
we would they should do unto us," as he led black and white labor in winning
one of its victories over capital.[1] Coghlan was a Sumter politician and
blacksmith. He represented Sumter County at the 1868 South Carolina
constitutional convention. Southern capital had been defeated militarily during
the Civil War and its Democratic party was defeated politically at the 1868
convention.

The
capitalist system in the antebellum period had been harsh against the blacks.
Yet the blacks were to a greater or lesser degree able to establish a parallel
"government" based on the golden rule (Lk 6:31; Mt. 7:12). For
example, Larry Hudson has shown that despite laws against it, blacks owned
property and married. Hudson wrote:

Because slaves were property, they could
neither legally own property nor marry; that they managed to do both was the
reality of slavery. Antebellum slaves could and did act as if they were legal
owners of land and other property, and slave owners, if not the courts,
recognized them as property owners.[2]

Capital
had less control over white labor than over black. It should not be surprising
that the whites had their own golden rule that ran parallel or in opposition to
capital's rule and at the domestic level often dominated. This article focuses
on this white labor as illustrated by the "golden rule" as operative
in successive generations of an antebellum and postbellum family in Sumter
County, South Carolina. Their combined lives extended across much of the 19th
century. The basis and purpose of their parallel government was their labor.
The golden rule they established in their home, communities and, to the extent
they were able, at the state, federal and international levels, optimized the
conditions and return on their labor.

At
the outset, a few words on method: in the classical political-economic
tradition that prevailed in the 19th century, class analysis was the norm. This
corresponded to the reality that class position largely determined everything
else - housing, education, health care, life expectancy, life opportunities and
even values and ideas. The struggle of labor against capital constituted the
main substance of 19th century history. Historian Tony Freyer summarized the
importance of class analysis in his study of 19th-century law:

Most politicians and publicists in the
19th century contended that the producing classes were most important to
American prosperity. For the proponents of a labor theory of value, producers
were those who made and deserved the fruits of all true wealth. The
manipulative creators of false paper wealth - bankers, lawyers, corporations generally,
and big merchants - were agents of capitalist enterprise that threatened the
producing classes.[3]

The Stafford Family (1786-1840). The
domestic government of the two antebellum generations of the Stafford family
will be outlined, along with their relation to the parallel state and federal
governments. Then will follow an analysis of two postbellum Jones families. The
antebellum generations were headed first, by Joshua and Charity Stafford and
second by their daughter, Barbary, who married Eli Jones. In both generations a
parent died prematurely, leaving small children and a struggle to preserve home
and family.

Joshua
and Charity Stafford married in 1786. For the next 30 years they farmed corn,
cotton, wheat and garden crops in South Carolina middle country, what is now
Dalzell in northwest Sumter County (designated during much of the 19th century
as Providence township).[4] Successful small farming was labor
intensive.[5] Family government centered on collective
production by the able-bodied. More specifically, as Stephanie McCurry
documents, not only men, but also women and children, starting at age 12,
normally did field labor.[6] The introduction of cotton farming in
South Carolina's middle country coincided with the early part of Joshua and
Charity's marriage and was an economic benefit to them.[7] A description of the type of work Joshua
and Charity did in cotton production on a small farm appears in a diary kept by
South Carolinian James Sloan. Sloan, his wife, son (age 15) and two daughters
(ages 13 and 14) worked in the fields from late spring to the end of picking in
early December. They were sometimes out from 6:00 in the morning until 7:00 in
the evening. At midday when the heat was intense there would be a prolonged (2
hours or more) rest period, when lunch (dinner) would be eaten and a nap taken.
On Saturdays they would work half a day, and in slack seasons there would be no
Saturday work.[8]

As
American production increased after 1800, the price of cotton leveled off and
then, with Jefferson's embargo, fell. During the War of 1812, the price
bottomed at $.09/lb.[9] To maintain their income, cotton farmers
like the Staffords expanded production. They got paid less per pound, but by
producing more, they could still support a family. Increased capital (slaves
and land) was often necessary for increased production. The demand for
increased capital resulted in the doubling of land and slave costs at the same
time that cotton prices were declining.[10] In the first part of the nineteenth
century an adult cultivated about 10 acres. This included corn, cotton and
garden acreage. The Staffords cultivated 20 acres, which they had doubled by
1817 with the help of adult sons, Lunsford and Hartwell (b. 1794), and the
purchase of Hannah, a slave.[11]

When
Joshua died in 1817, Charity was able to continue production as usual because
of her own increased labor and that of her son Hartwell and daughter Barbary
(age 18).[12] This production continued for a decade
despite the loss of son Hartwell and slave Hannah.[13] Charity wrote an account of her labors,
although as she put it, "I had no learning."[14] That account is in several legal cases
in which she gave testimony.[15] Illustrative is an 1829 case in which
she described with pride how she had "worked in the fields as a laborer
and in the house did chores proper for a free woman."[16] In her golden rule she worked early and
late; she saved and skimped, ate chicken neck, sewed and patched and darned and
hoped and planned and schemed and fretted. Every stick and stone, every tree
and shrub and flower on the farm was partly her own planning and her own work.
In her view she did more work and got more results than most women would have
even attempted:

I was able to purchase the slave, houses,
etc. in consequence of the most personal industry which I presume few if any
other white women in the county would have attempted or could have sustained.[17]

She remarked on her success at keeping
her family together in the manner to which it had been accustomed prior to her
spouse's death:

I was deprived of the entire benefits of
the estate of my husband for two years after his death due to it being taken by
the executor. But after that I got the benefits and raised my family well in
the manner it had been accustomed.[18]

After
1825 the Staffords began to cut back on the acreage they planted. By 1829 their
cotton crop was down to one bale (300 lbs), worth $15.[19] The reduction in part was the result of
normal domestic changes. Daughter Barbary married in 1825 and moved away. What
one 19th-century father said of his daughter could have been said of Barbary:
"My papa said he lost his best hand when I got married."[20] The three remaining children were old
enough but unable and/or unwilling to do the work that Barbary had done. For
example, son Elijah, born in 1807, accepted the view of the idle rich that
labor was negative and that alcoholism and the consumption of luxury goods was
positive.[21] Charity, that is, Joshua Stafford's
estate, was sued in an equity case by several merchants for Elijah's expenses
on February 26, 1828. Elijah had "absconded secretly" at age 18 in
1826 "to seek his fortune" and to avoid his debtors.[22] Daughter Sarah shared the same
anti-labor ideas as Elijah and was even more of a problem than her brother. She
married a dead-beat who came to live with the family and added both his and his
horse's mouth to feed without doing any work. When Sarah and Ruben Long (from
Wilmington, North Carolina), sought a portion of Joshua's estate, Charity
counterclaimed against Ruben "for one year of board, during which he had
lived with her or lived at her expense" without rendering any service and
for keeping his horse there for three months. Of Sarah's suit, Charity
commented, "It is ungrateful. Sarah has been the least assistance and the
most expensive and I have been most indulgent."[23] Finally, as Charity put it concerning
the labor of her youngest son, "James was always sickly and unable to do
hard labor."[24]

The
Stafford family produced less for the market but the mouths it fed stayed about
the same. Son James Stafford at age 17 had married Marianna Mathis in 1836 and
brought his wife home to live under Charity's roof.[25] By the time Charity died five years
later, they had two children and were still living with her.[26]

Jones Family 1825-1855. The Staffords accommodated
their domestic government to the hardship of premature death and the weight of
those who would not or could not carry their own weight. A similar
accommodation was achieved in the next generation. Barbary (Stafford) Jones
(1799-1884), one of Charity's older children, was 18 years of age when her
father died in 1817. She continued to live with her mother after her father's
death until 1825, when she married Eli Jones (1794-1839). Eli was one of the 9
children of William Jones and Ann Freeman Jones 1763-1847), who had migrated to
Sumter County from Amherst Co. Va. during the period of the Revolution. Eli's
boyhood farm neighbored the Staffords. When Eli was 15 years old in 1809, his
own father died. Eli's mother and the children had always been partners in
running the farm. His father's death did not cause significant problems for
Eli's widow and the children (aged 2 on up). In 1813 Ann married John Parker
(d. 1831).

When
Eli and Barbary married, they had no capital. This situation changed only to a
limited extent before Eli's death in 1839. In 1829 after four years together
and two children, Eli and Barbary had saved $300 and bought a 100-acre farm of
mainly clay soil in Providence, about one-half mile north of Charity's farm
just off the Sumter-Camden road.[27] Like the Staffords, the Jones had six
children. They ranged in age from 3 to 12 at the time of Eli's death. They were
younger than Charity's had been when Joshua died. It took Charity about 10
years (1817-1827) before her youngest child reached adulthood. It was 16 years
(1839-1855) before Barbary's youngest (Mary Placida) married at age 20 and left
home.

To
run the farm without Eli meant more work for Barbary and her children. But farm
labor was nothing new for them. Throughout the 15-year marriage, Eli, Barbary
and the children had run the farm. They had not had enough capital to buy a
slave. But just before he died in 1839, Eli, perhaps in anticipation of death,
did acquire a "Negro boy."[28] Historian Philip Racine commented with
admiration on the work of a similar family of the period. This family kept a
journal of its achievements. Racine's remarks might apply equally to the Jones
family:

David and Emily Harris and their children
worked with their hands every day, much of the time long and hard to maintain
what they had. Farmers were not lazy, nor were they casual about their work.
There is no evidence that they lacked either energy or ambition. What
historians have recently been suggesting about southern farmers--that they
valued leisure more than hard work may have been true for some, but not for
most.[29]

In
addition to Barbary and the children's labor, the Jones family's government had
help from several other sources after Eli's death. Most important, they had the
use but not the ownership of Eli's estate, which was valued at $611 and
included the young slave and the land.[30] Another aid was a gift from Charity's
estate. Charity died in 1840 about a year after Eli. Her estate was valued at
$549.93.[31] From it the Joneses received, in time, a
life estate in an adult slave and her children, that is, in "Molly and her
increase."[32]

In
1850, ten years after Eli's death, the real estate of the Jones' farm was worth
$500, which was about what it had been when Eli died.[33] All five of the Jones' children that had
lived to adulthood were still under the family roof and helping with the
farming. However the older ones were mainly doing wage labor off the farm and
contributing part of their income. Ellerby H. (age 24) was working for a
merchant. Washington Nicholas (age 22) was working as a laborer on the new
South Carolina Railroad (Charleston-Columbia) branch line that ran between
Stateburg (Manchester) and Camden.[34] The three younger children, Elizabeth
Charity (age 20), Charles H. (age 18) and Mary Placida (age 14) confined their
work to the farm.[35] The slave family was also helping.[36] Molly was 34 to 46. She had a son (age
19), two daughters (ages 15 and 17), and a granddaughter (age 2).

After
Eli's death, the Jones family kept itself together "in the manner it had
been accustomed." They never lacked for food. Since the family had little
money, they stayed at home, worked in the fields, sat on the piazza and talked,
read the Bible, books and the weekly Sumter newspaper, visited the neighbors
and relatives, chewed tobacco, fished in Pebble Creek and Rembert's Pond,
trapped and swam. There were high-backed cain rocking chairs on the porch for
the warm months and before the fireplace for the cold months. On special days
such as George Washington's Birthday, the Fourth of July and court, election
and market days, they went to Sumterville or further afield. During the 1850s
in Sumterville on the Fourth of July there was a parade of the Claremont
(Sumter) militia troop which included Barbary's three sons, Ellerbe, Nicholas
and Charlie. After the parade there was a barbecue, fire works, band concert
and square dance.[37] On Sunday and for funerals, weddings and
baptisms, the family sang hymns and prayed at home or at Providence Methodist
church, which neighbored their farm.[38]

I-a.)Relations
with State and Federal Government. The domestic golden rule established by
the Stafford-Jones family optimized their labor and its return. The challenge
to the family government was not domestic hardship but the hostility of the
capitalist economy.[39] Labor's parallel government supported
agrarian reform, the growth of industry and public services that benefited
workers. For example, from colonial times forward laboring people had sought an
agrarian program that would assure ownership of land to those who worked it
rather than to speculators.[40] Capital wanted the reverse. The magnates
monopolized land, slaves and state government. The south was superior to the
rest of the United States in agricultural resources, but the benefit to the
white majority, not to mention the black, was limited.[41]

The
slave aspect of the system was for the benefit of capital, not labor. Slavery
depressed the value and return on white labor. Small farmers like the
Stafford-Joneses, who were able to hold on, saw their children forced out.
Several of the Stafford-Jones' adult children had to migrate out of the area.
Others stayed in Sumter County but owned no land and worked as laborers,
overseers, tenants or took up a trade.[42] Beginning with the 1810 census, a net
out-migration of whites from South Carolina was recorded until the Civil War.[43] Between 1850 and 1860 the white
population in Sumter County dropped from 9,800 to 6,800, and that of the black
from 23,000 to 16,000.[44] Those with insufficient capital or who
failed to expand production were marginalized.[45] The out-migration of whites is often
pictured as benevolent, especially in comparison to the forced migration of
blacks.[46] But the market system was coercive.
White as well as black families were broken up by forced migration.

In
the antebellum era southern and northern monopolists defeated most attempts at
agrarian reform, such as federal homestead laws. Only in 1862 with the
withdrawal of the south, and the need of northern capital to placate labor into
joining its army, did Congress finally pass the Homestead Act.[47] Southern capital did not want land
reform in the western states in part because it did not want white labor to
leave the south in even greater numbers. Black labor gave a better return on
investment, but capital needed the whites to keep the blacks under control. For
example, by 1810 because of the white out-migration and black in-migration, 61%
(11,600) of the Sumter County population were slaves, up from 54% (6,500) in
1800. By 1860 it was 70%.[48] This was dangerous. Capital had lost
everything in the 1791 Haitian slave revolution and it did not want a repeat.[49] The problem concerned Governor Stephen
D. Miller (1787-1838), from Stateburg Township, which bordered Providence
Township on the west. In 1829 he brought up to the South Carolina legislature
the possibility of enslaving or ensurfing the white population to keep them
from migrating:

The right to set limits to emigration is
an original principle in the body politic. The right to incorporate strangers
into a government and to defend them when incorporated does not imply a right
on the part of the citizen to secede. -- The assent of an infant to be governed
by the law is a political fiction without which government would be dissolved.
Every convict in this state is supposed to be a party to his own execution; nor
is it a greater exertion of municipal law to cut off emigration than to punish
by imprisonment for debt.[50]

The propertied commonly believed that slavery
was the proper status of both black and white laboring people.[51]

Governor
Miller was an attorney for the magnates. A difficulty with ensurfing or
enslaving white laboring people was that they were a majority in the militia.
For example, during the 1820s the capital-intensive farmers were agitating for
nullification of the tariff and succession from the union. But small farmers
like the Stafford-Joneses were not against the development of U.S.
manufacturing, especially in the south. Economic diversification and tariffs
limited the big slaveowners but provided off-farm employment for laboring
people.[52] When a call went out from monopoly for a
state convention to ratify dismemberment of the union, the Sumter County
militia took a vote. They did this in September 1830 at their annual countywide
muster to elect the colonel of the Sumter regiment. After the speeches and
debate, a majority of the 131 militia present voted against nullification or
dismemberment.[53] Both Eli Jones and Lunsford, the son of
Charity Stafford, were part of the militia. For small farmers separation from
the union meant increased power for the magnates. Had they sought to ensurf or
enslave the whites, the monopolists might have found themselves overthrown 30
years earlier than they were, by a union of whites and blacks.

What
the South Carolina assembly enacted was not agrarian reform but rather charity
for capital at public expense. Typically, the assembly provided that when
slaves were executed by the government for insurrection, their owners were
compensated by the government.[54] Unlike some states the assembly,
resisted the enactment of a homestead exemption to protect a debtor's land or
farm equipment from confiscation by creditors.[55] For small farmers, it was creditors, not
slave insurrections, that were a threat. The Stafford-Jones family were their
own labor. To survive they needed to protect their land and tools from
confiscation. They did not need slaves. It was only in 1851 that the
legislature enacted a Homestead Act which allowed small farmers to exempt 50
acres of real estate and $500 of personal property from levy and sale.[56] The act was meant to keep whites from
being forced out of the state. At the time of the enactment, the legislature
was increasing its military spending and needed labor to fight the upcoming
war.[57]

Besides
compensation for executed slaves, there was a second program offered by the
assembly in place of agrarian reform. This was the conscript militia system.
Its function was to make sure, via martial law when necessary, that there was
no agrarian reform. Providence in the 1840s and 1850s was part of the Upper
Battalion, 44th Regiment, South Carolina Militia.[58] The Jones' three boys and all white
males between 18 and 45 years of age except ministers, school teachers and
newspaper editors, by law had to report to the muster grounds at 8:00 am on the
second Saturday of each month for a full day of marching, drills and mock
battles. They had to provide their own muskets, bayonets, ammunition, drums,
food rations and knap sack. Those who failed to appear were fined one dollar.[59] For the rank and file the musters were a
drain from farm work. The beneficiary was capital, which needed an armed force
to contain the slaves. When the propertied agitated for secession in 1850, the
common objection of the middle country small farmer militia was that the rich
should fight their own war.[60] The Sumter Watchman commented in 1855:

The militia system compels a poor man to
leave his little crop in the busiest season, and walk from 15 to 30 miles to a
review or if sick and unable to attend, to walk 20 or 30 miles to be tried by
court martial.[61]

The Sumter grand jury in the April term
of 1855 characterized the militia as "odious and oppressive in its
operations and a nuisance."[62]

Despite
state and federal policies, the Stafford-Jones' parallel government had its own
homestead law. To protect against the squeeze from creditors and the market
system, the families in large measure boycotted the market system. They
practiced what was called "safety-first, self-sufficient"
agriculture.[63] They increased the goods they made at
home. This decreased both their need for manufactured goods and their need and
time to grow cash crops. The family made most of the cloth used on their farms
from their own cotton and wool. During rainy weather and in the winter months
the adults carded and spun thread from cotton or wool, then wove it into bolts
of "jean cloth" on a loom and then stitched it into clothes, bonnets,
stockings, curtains, mattress covers, diapers, and cotton-picking bags.[64] "Home spun" in the 1820s
became a symbol of protest against the market system and the people wore it not
only at home but to political meetings, church, school and to market and court
days.[65] Laboring people who did not minimize market
involvement, as in the 1820s and 1840s, often met with disaster. The squeeze
came when the cost of slaves and land rose, along with the cost of manufactured
goods, due in part to the federal tariff, while at the same time the price of
cotton declined.[66] Households that borrowed to purchase
land and slaves were often unable to pay their debts. The Sumterville and
Camden newspapers were filled with notices of sheriffs' sales. Bankruptcies and
foreclosures destroyed many small farmers.[67] Tony Freyer points out that in the early
19th century, not merely in the south, one household in five would, during its
working lifetime, fail outright rather than merely default on a particular
debt. And the incidence of difficulty rose as the century advanced.[68]

The
inheritance laws were used by the Stafford-Jones parallel government as another
type of domestic homestead law. In 1840 Charity Stafford willed her farm, which
by then was being worked by the family of son James, to James' infant daughter
(age 2) "for the benefit of her father."[69] Because he did not have title, James had
no collateral on which to borrow. The family with its 11 children was forced to
engage in mainly non-market, non-slave, marginal production. The positive side
was that 40 years later James' widow and children still had the farm at a time
when many farmers had been wiped out by bankruptcy after the Civil War.
Similarly Barbary Stafford, shortly before she died in 1884, deeded her farm to
Elizabeth David Jones (1831-1887), the wife of her youngest son, Charles H.
Jones (1833-1891).[70] Son Charlie had attempted farming for
the market and ended up a bankrupt.[71]

I-b.)
Public Services. Besides agrarian reform, labor's golden rule
supported public services that benefited labor. The lack of government services
such as decent roads, bridges and transportation, pauper support, public
medical care and inexpensive and near-by courts, jails and schools was one of
the complaints in the Declaration of Independence.[72] When the South Carolina assembly finally
completed the 110-mile road between Columbia and Charleston (now US 176) in
1829, it was a toll road. A one-way stagecoach fare was $10 or almost as much
as a laboring person could make in a month.[73] Similarly, court costs were so high that
small farmers could not use them. Patrick Brady described the problem:

The operations of the court system were
of little benefit to citizens lacking a large stake in the economy. Court costs
were prohibitive for farmers with small claims. . . Debtors were forced to pay
court fees as high as the original debt.[74]

When
the assembly enacted a public education law in 1811, it provided free education
only for paupers.[75] Even these schools were under funded and
limited in number.[76] The preacher, William Brisbane,
complained in an 1849 pamphlet:

This state is said to have a republican
form of government. It may be the form, but the substance is wanting. The great
mass of the people cannot get their children educated.[77]

There were no free schools to serve the
Stafford-Jones children.[78] They relied on their parallel
government, that is, on the high-priced Woodville Academy and private tutors.[79] A laboring family with a $300/year
income spent $25 a year per child on education. With three children, families
like the Staffords spent one-quarter of their income ($75) on education.[80] The Joneses had to pay even more, since
more of their children were of school age and for longer periods.[81] Like the Staffords, all of the Jones
children learned to read and write.[82] It has been alleged that poorer farmers
"kept their children at home for farm work, which inhibited the
development of public schools throughout the southern states."[83] If the experience of the Stafford-Jones
is any indication, it was the system that was deficient, not the laboring
people, who managed, despite the system, to achieve literacy.

There
was a fourth public service of interest to Sumter's laboring people in addition
to decent roads, courts and schools. This was a county poor house to care for
the homeless black and white aged, insane, infirm and orphans.[84] The inadequate response of capital
forced labor's parallel government to serve this function.[85] For example, in 1860 Sarah Graham (age
45), a pauper who had been the Jones' neighbor, was living under their roof.
Sarah had never married and lived with her mother until her mother died in the
1850s.[86]

States'
rights and racial division were what capital offered white labor in place of
services. These were used to justify turning the bulk of government services
into little more than protectionism for the profits that capital extracted from
the slave system.[87] Governor Stephen Miller, the Sumter
politician who suggested enslaving whites, was a founder of the states' rights
party in the 1820s. While opposing internal improvements, public education and
industrial development, he himself migrated to Mississippi in the 1830s and
supported federal power for Indian removal, tracking down fugitive slaves,
taking territory from Mexico and Spain, and naval protection of international
agricultural trade against piracy.[88] States' rights, state control and
territorial expansionism were of little consequence in labor's parallel
government, nor did the Methodism - in the case of the Stafford-Jones family -
accommodate capital. In the 1790s as the slavery system expanded, white labor
resisted. Unlike South Carolina Episcopalianism, Methodism was a religion of
laboring people. A majority of the Santee circuit's members, which included
those in Providence and Sumterville, were black.[89] They were in disagreement with the Claremont
district Baptist preacher, Richard Furman, who advocated slave-owner notions
about subordination being God's idea:

The order of providence is that a
considerable portion of the human race must necessarily move in a humble sphere
and be generally at the disposal of their fellow man.[90]

Women,
slaves and laboring people in general had their own ideas about the order of
providence. Frank Owsley's study found they had a "loving God" who
was on the side of workers.[91] In the Methodist church there was a lack
of distinction between clergy and laity. Slaves and women are said to have
preached, exhorted and disciplined.[92] The church was paid for and controlled
by the members. They ministered to their less fortunate neighbors.[93] Their golden rule condemned slavery as
theft.[94] Some Methodist congregations dismissed
pro-slavery clergy.[95] In turn the magnates had contempt for
Methodism because of its egalitarian doctrines and the dominance of black and
laboring people.[96] Historian Henry Lacy maintains that the
ideology of antebellum "plain folk" sought to sharpen racial and
gender boundaries.[97] This was not the experience of the
Stafford-Joneses. To the extent capital dominated, those who resisted risked
economic and physical survival. The result was a thick skin, racism, fear and
few public services for laboring people.[98] But there remained a parallel government
which capital could not dominate.

II.)
Civil War and After. For labor's
parallel government, the Civil War period resulted at the state level in some
improvements. Illustrative of the Jones family in this period were Robert
Lorenzo Jones (1823-1896) and Susan Watts Jones (1834-1856), and second,
Charles (Charlie) H. Jones (1833-1891) and Elizabeth (Lizzie) Margaret David
Jones (1831-1887). As in the antebellum discussion, the domestic government of
the two Civil War generations will first be outlined, then their relation with
the parallel state and federal system.

Jones Family I. Robert L. Jones was the
third of eight children of James F. Jones (1782-1850s) and Susannah Jones
(1790-1875).[99] Robert was raised on a 75-acre farm in
Spring Hill Township about where present-day state routes 231 and 7 intersect.
The Spring Hill Joneses were located 5 miles north of their cousins, the Jones
that lived in Providence.[100] Spring Hill is now in Lee County, but it
was in Sumter County in the 19th century. In 1850 the value of the Jones'
Spring Hill farm was $200. The Spring Hill Joneses never had slaves and
belonged to St. Johns Methodist Church, established in 1799.[101] Robert L. Jones did not learn to read or
write.[102] As a young adult in the 1840s and 1850s,
he worked as a farm laborer and overseer.[103] In 1850 he was living by himself in
Providence in an outbuilding and working as overseer for J. M. Spann (b. 1810)
and Elizabeth Spann (b. 1818). The Spann's property was valued at $6,000 and
neighbored the farm of Robert's aunt, Barbary Jones.[104] When he was 28 years old in 1852, Robert
married Susan A. Watts. Her family's farm was in the Rose Hill area of Spring
Hill.[105] Susan's mother was Sarah Brown Watts,
who had died in 1844 when Susan was ten. Susan's father, William Hampton Watts
(1807-1873) then raised his 6 children and never remarried. In 1850 Hampton
Watts' property was valued at $2,000.[106]

Robert
and Susan Jones had no land when they married and this did not change. Their
families were not in a position to help them. In the 1850s, Robert's oldest
brother, Rivers Jones (b. 1814), his wife Frances (b. 1815), and their 5
children were farming the land on which Robert grew up.[107] At the same time Robert's younger sister
and two of his younger brothers were also living there along with their
parents.[108] On Susan's side, her father was still
raising several minor children on his farm.[109] Robert and Susan themselves had two small
children by 1855. They decided to move to Geneva, Alabama and try their
fortune. Robert's brother, Wade Jones had immigrated there earlier. Wayne Flynt
finds that in opposition to the slaveowners, the working class in Alabama had
by 1850 established an "alternative set of institutions," such as
schools and churches, which served labor and had little regard for the
slaveowners doctrine of states' rights.[110]

In
Alabama Robert found employment as an overseer.[111] The following year (1856) they had
another child. Soon after, Susan died. The Joneses did not immediately return
to South Carolina. Until the Civil War Robert continued his employment as an
overseer in Alabama and raised his children alone. The 1860 census listed R. L.
Jones (age 37), born in S.C., living with his three children, ages 4 to 7. His
7 year old was attending school. The Joneses had moved from Geneva to the
Ramah, Alabama area. Robert was working as an overseer for T. J. Orum, who
listed his occupation as horseracer. Orum was from Maryland and had a wife and
three children. His wealth (in slaves) was listed as $45,000.[112]

Robert
Jones' situation as a widower, like that of Charity Stafford and Barbary Jones,
was a challenge. His children, ages 1 to 3, when their mother died, were
younger than Charity's and Barbary's had been when their spouses died. Charity
and Barbary had the use of a farm and were able to limit their involvement in
the market system. Robert had only his labor. As an overseer he was not allowed
to have his own livestock, but he received wages averaging $150 a year plus
lodging, meat and flour. This provided adequately for his family's necessities,
including clothing, medical bills, childcare, church and school.[113] In time the family was also aided by a
gift from Susan's father. At about the time that his daughter died, Hampton
Watts on December 26, 1856 sold some or all of his slaves and turned the
proceeds into bonds. Watts' six children by then were adults and he did not
need to work. The bonds were held in a trust for his six children.[114] Susan's share went to her three
children. That is, each year the income from the gift went toward supporting
the children.

The
Civil War did not immediately have an effect on the Joneses in Alabama. Abraham
Lincoln was elected president in November 1860. In February 1861 the
Confederate government was organized in Montgomery, Alabama, only a short
distance from the Joneses in Ramah. Fort Sumter was taken on April 12, 1861 and
the war began. Robert did not enlist. A year later on April 6, 1862, the
Confederate Congress, which by then had moved to Richmond, Va., enacted a
conscription measure against those who resisted military service. However,
overseers were exempted for the first year.[115]

In
the fall of 1862, after the crops had been taken in at Ramah, the Joneses moved
back to South Carolina. Robert enlisted on November 20, 1862 in Company G, 20th
Regiment, South Carolina Infantry.[116] Already in the company were Robert's
younger brother, George W. Jones (1836-1912), at least one first cousin on his
deceased wife's side, and various members of his church including the company's
captain.[117] Robert's children stayed with their
widowed grandmother, Susannah Jones, on the family's Spring Hill farm. Robert's
oldest brother, Rivers, and his family were still living there. The farm at the
time was valued at $300.[118] Robert supported the children from the
$11 per month wages which he earned as a soldier.[119] The children were able to attend school
only for short periods during the war years.[120] While serving in the war, Robert came
down with a chronic lung problem but he remained at his post until the end in
May 1865.

After
the war Robert was unable to find employment as an overseer. He moved in at his
mother's with his children and brother's family. He helped on the farm and did
day labor in the neighborhood. Because of the difficult times, he went to the
Sumter District Equity Court a year after returning from service to petition
for an allotment of some of the assets to which his children were entitled from
the gift of their grandfather to their mother. They needed the funds for their
maintenance. The report of the equity commissioner described the family's
difficulties:

Robert L. Jones, the father of
petitioners was in the army up to May 1865. The petitioners lived with their
grandmother, Mrs. Susan Jones during 1865. Robert L. Jones is now living with
the grandmother, too, trying to farm. The place is very poor and it does not
look like he can support the children. Robert L. Jones has been suffering for
years with a very bad cough. Robert L. Jones tried to get employment as an
overseer, after he came back from the army but failed.

The children have been going to school
parts of three years past. There is no female connected with the minors who
could take charge of them, besides the grandmother, except one aunt who is in
feeble health, and in moderate circumstances, and has a large family. Robert L.
Jones never remarried after the death of the petitioner's mother. There are
certain bonds, valued at $4,300 which the children are entitled to because of
the sale of Negroes.[121]

Not
long after Robert Jones petitioned for the allotment for his children in 1866,
he married Videau A. Spann (1831-1914). He was 43 and she was 34 and had never
been married. She was the daughter of James R. Spann (b. 1798) and Emily
Dinkins Spann (1802-1875). The Spanns had had 9 children and lived on a 60-acre
farm that neighbored Barbary Jones' farm in Providence. The Joneses moved into
an outbuilding on the Spann's farm. Robert's three children finished growing up
there. In addition Robert and Videau had three children of their own, only one
of whom lived to adulthood. The Joneses had an informal sharecrop arrangement
with Videau's mother, who by then was a widow. They raised corn, hogs, wheat, peas,
oats, cotton, sweet potatoes, turnips, chickens and garden crops. They, or
Videau's mother, had a mule, a horse and a milk cow. Robert and the children,
as they got older, also did wage labor in the neighborhood.[122] A testimony to the Jones' parenting and
fiscal reliability was given in 1872 by Dr. John B. Witherspoon, a local
physician, and William E. Richardson, a lawyer:

We have been acquainted for many years
with Robert L. Jones. He is a proper person to be appointed guardian of his children
(Susan, age 16, Robert, age 18, and William, age 19). He is the guardian for
the estate of his wife, Susan A., daughter of W. H. Watts, which is valued at
$1100.[123]

After her mother died in 1875, Videau
bought in her name alone part of the land which she and Robert and the children
had been farming. Robert Jones died at age 73 in 1896. His granddaughter,
Lizzie Jones (Troublefield) remembered him as heavy set and the one she would
run to for comfort when unhappy. He had a sympathetic ear. After Robert died,
Videau then farmed the place with several of her un-married sisters and with
son Harry, who was age 22 when his father died and who had attended the
University of South Carolina for a brief period and served in the
Spanish-American war after his father's death. Videau died at age 85 in 1914.[124]

Jones Family II. The premature death of
Susan Watts Jones and the Civil War were challenges to the Robert Jones
family's domestic government. A similar situation faced another Jones family of
the period. Charles (Charlie) H. Jones, the fourth child of Eli and Barbary
(Stafford) Jones was 6 years old when his father died in 1839. Charlie's father
left him a cow as an inheritance. As a youth Charlie worked and went to school.
In the later years he attended Sumterville Academy. He did not quit school
until age 19, when he got married on February 23, 1853. His wife was
21-year-old Margaret Elizabeth (Lizzie) David. A hospital record later
described Lizzie as cheerful, frank, quiet, industrious and never intemperate.
She used snuff but later abandoned it.[125]

Upon
marriage, Charlie and his wife immediately took on the raising of his wife's
younger siblings, the youngest of whom was age 2. Her father, George David (b.
1793) died in 1850 at age 58 and her mother, Lucy Kennon (Macon) David (b.
1808), died two years later at age 48. The Jones and the David children lived
in the David's Sumterville home, which was bounded by what is now south Main
St., Fulton St. and Davis (David) St. The house had earlier belonged to Lizzie's
maternal grandparents, Hartwell Macon and Elizabeth (Powell) Macon.

For
the first 8 years of their marriage, the Joneses farmed, but did not own the
land in the estate of Lizzie's parents. This land was 6 miles southeast of
Sumterville.[126] The land and the slaves that farmed it
had belonged to Lizzie's paternal grandparents, Isaac David and Margaret
(Brunson) David. In the last 5 years of his life, Lizzie's father was insane.[127] When he died, he had significant debts,
so that his widow and children had little to inherit. Even without insanity,
the 1840s were difficult years for cotton farmers.[128] Also helping with the raising of the
David children was Lizzie's next younger sister, Mary Ellen (Ellenora) David
(1832-1908). She married Thomas V. Walsh (1838-1903) in 1852. They lived down
the street from the Jones and also farmed the David's land.[129] Another help with raising the David
children was Lenora (Leah) Capell, age 43 in 1850, who lived next door to the
Jones-Davids. She was the sister of Lizzie's father and was married to Carter
G. Capell. They had 8 children of their own.[130]

The
Jones, Walshes and Davids were Methodists, although George David's father,
Isaac David, was Jewish in background. Lizzie's mother had been a charter
member of the Sumterville Methodist Female Benevolent Working Society (Women's
Aid Circle).[131] Lizzie's mother did not learn to read,
but Lizzie and her siblings did. The Joneses had their first child, Thomas M.,
in 1856 and another, Frances Ellen (Fannie) in 1858. In 1860, the estate of Lizzie
Jones' parents was distributed. The Joneses received $400, enough to buy a
144-acre farm near Cain Savannah Swamp, southwest of town.[132]

Charlie
Jones at age 29 and Lizzie were no more enthusiastic about going to war than
was their first cousin, Robert L. Jones. On April 6, 1862 the Confederate
Congress enacted a conscription measure because working people would not fight
voluntarily. Charlie enlisted the following month on May 5, 1862, as a private
in the Claremont Cavalry Company. The conscription law gave those of
conscription age a 30-day grace period to allow them to enlist
"voluntarily" and escape the "odium" of being forced into
service.[133] Charlie and a number of his neighbors
waited until the last day of the grace period to enlist.[134] Cavalry service was viewed by some as
safer and less onerous than infantry service. Confederate General H. D. Hill
offered a reward to anyone who would ever find a dead cavalry man with his
spurs on.[135] The Claremont company captain was
Charlie's brother-in-law and neighbor, Thomas Walsh.[136] Also in the company with Charlie was
another brother-in-law whom Charlie had help raise, Isaac Macon David.[137] The Claremont cavalry was one of about
10 companies in Holcombe's Legion, South Carolina Volunteers and was soon
designated as Company "A."[138] Its duty for most of the war was the
protection of the eastern approach to Richmond, the Confederate capital.
Charlie, as a private, was paid $12 per month, which included pay for the use
of his horse.[139] Charlie got a furlough from the
departmental headquarters for 30 days starting August 31, 1863. Shortly before
the furlough Lizzie had bought a 15-acre plot in the town of Sumter next to
where the family had been living at the David's.[140]

On
March 18, 1864 Holcombe's legion along with Trenholm's, Tucker's and Co.
"A" of Boykin's Squadrons, South Carolina Cavalry, were consolidated
to form the 7th Regiment of the South Carolina Cavalry.[141] Charlie's company "A" became
company "I" of the 7th Regiment. Beginning in May 1864 the 7th
Regiment, as the Confederacy's eyes and ears, patrolled, picketed,
reconnoitered and scouted all the territory not occupied by the federals. This
was a big part of the yearlong successful defense against the much larger
federal army's siege of Richmond and Petersburg from the east. It was only when
Richmond was evacuated that the federals were able to gain access.

The
regiment's rank and file fought not only the federal army but sometimes its own
leadership. Regimental commander Col. W. Pinkney Shingler had been a merchant
before the war and was well regarded by the troops. In May 1864 he was replaced
by Col. Alexander C. Haskell (1839-1910).[142] Haskell had seen little combat and his
appointment at age 25 was resented by the 7th Regiment veterans.[143] As regimental commander, historian
Foster Smith commented about the resentment:

The officering of the 7th Regiment South
Carolina Cavalry is a tale of ambition, influence and maneuvering. With the
Holcombe Legion furnishing half the companies and a battalion organization
already in place, the legionnaires naturally expected that they would form the
nucleus of the new Seventh Regiment and their officers would dominate in the
new command. However, their hope was not realized. . . Shingler had provoked
his superior, General Wise at least once. Shingler lacked the battlefield dash
and bureau support of Haskell.[144]

Haskell
maintained that the 7th Regiment had done "an immense deal of work in
picketing, watching and scouting, but little fighting."[145] The veterans had less interest than
Haskell in needlessly getting themselves killed.[146] Illustrative of this was an incident on
Haskell's first day in command on May 10, 1864 at Bermuda Hundred, south of the
James River. The federal army under General Benjamin F. Butler, the "beast
of New Orleans," was moving toward Richmond. Confederate General Robert
Hoke, who was serving as a major general under Beauregard's command, ordered
the 7th Regiment, which was the only cavalry in the area, to ascertain the
Union's position. To achieve this Haskell took several companies, one of which
was Charlie's. Haskell rode out well ahead of the two companies, accompanied
only by two young couriers. After several hours they came upon a federal picket
post at the bottom of a long hill. After going halfway down the hill, Haskell
sent a courier back to have the companies come forward and charge the enemy.
The companies refused to come. Haskell commented:

I looked up the hill, and there they sat,
pow-wowing. So I drew my sword and said to the two couriers, "Boys, you
are not afraid. We can run them in." "Yes, colonel," they
eagerly responded, and out flashed their sabers. "Charge," I cried,
and we put the spurs in and dashed down the long-hill at the picket post.[147]

Haskell was pious and some of the
entertainment indulged in by the troops did not please him. For example, one
un-named captain, whom Haskell accused of being dissipated before he got to
Virginia, would get drunk and send for a pious member of the company and have
him pray for the captain.[148]

Charlie
Jones had a number of run-ins with Haskell. The most significant was in August
1864 when Charlie was elected lieutenant of Co. I. Haskell refused to let him
assume the position.[149] When the Confederate Congress enacted
the Conscription Act of April 6, 1862, it included a provision that companies
could elect their captains; at the same time Jefferson Davis, the president,
had the right to name staff officers. The provision for election was done over
the objection of President Davis.[150] The election provision was included
because labor viewed conscription as slavery.[151] The magnates, that is, those with 20 or
more slaves, exempted themselves from the law. Allowing the election of
officers made conscription look less like slavery. Hence the rank and file took
seriously its right to elect its captains.[152]

Despite
Halskell's objections, Charlie took command after Haskell was put out of
service by a wound on October 7, 1864 at the Battle of Darbytown Road/Johnson's
Farm against Union General August Kautz's division. When Haskell came back on duty
on January 31, 1865 after his recuperation from the wound, he had Charlie court
marshaled for having gone on leave for several weeks with some of the troops
during the slow month of January 1865.[153] Charlie, as an officer, had the right to
resign. Because of developments in South Carolina and his dislike for Haskell,
Charlie exercised his right.[154]

After
his resignation from the Confederate army, Charlie returned to Sumter and was
soon involved in defending his own back yard. General Sherman's troops had taken
Columbia, S.C. on February 17, 1865. Wade Hampton had surrendered it without a
fight, but there was still much destruction of the city. Sherman then moved
north in early March, 1865 to join up with Grant's army. Sherman requested that
the federal forces on the coast at Beaufort, S.C. destroy the Wilmington and
Manchester Railroad and the government stores and ammunition warehoused along
the railroad's right-of-way.[155] Manchester, which was the southern end
of the railroad, was about 10 miles from Sumter. Sherman's request resulted in
an expedition of 2,500 federal troops led by General Edward Potter toward the
middle country, which set out on April 5, 1865.

Charleston
had surrendered the day after Columbia was surrendered and suffered no
destruction. However, the state authorities decided to put up a fight against
the destruction of the railroad. This meant mobilizing the state military force
to oppose the federal troops.[156] On April 4, 1865 Governor Andrew Magrath
ordered the state militia, along with those in South Carolina on furlough from
the Confederate army, and those who had been exempted from conscription, such
as the politicians, clergy, journalists, physicians, educators and magnates, to
report for duty or be arrested as deserters and punished accordingly.[157] Out of the 30,000 effectives then in the
state, the governor's order resulted in a force of merely 600 troops at Sumter
to oppose the 2,500 federals.[158] The unionist politician, Benjamin Perry,
had complained in 1862 that the leading secessionists managed not to take up
arms.[159] This continued until the end.

By
Saturday April 8, 1865, the federal force, having not had to fight as it
marched inland through Georgetown, Williamsburg and Clarendon Counties, was
nearing Sumter.[160] The authorities at Sumter requested that
Charlie Jones lead a scouting expedition to find out the distance, direction
and strength of the enemy.[161] Charlie had only returned from the north
the previous day and was ill. He had celebrated his return the night before and
had neither horse nor gun. Nevertheless, on a borrowed horse and still in
uniform, he led a company of 6 mounted volunteers, mainly youngsters, to scout
out the enemy. By mid-morning they had gotten to Manning, 20 miles southwest of
Sumter. They had seen and heard nothing. Charlie had a headache and the horses
needed a rest. He took up the offer of Martha Norris, a family friend at
Manning to have a cup of coffee, while the horses and volunteers also took a
rest. About the time Charlie was pouring a second cup, there was a commotion in
the street. It was the federal army's advance guard. Charlie and his troops
made it back to Sumter after a close escape and further information gathering.

Based
on the scouting party's intelligence, the Confederates on the next day just outside
Sumter at the Battle of Dingle's Mill made the first and best stand that South
Carolina was able to muster against the federal troops in the final days of the
war.[162] But the Confederates were outnumbered
and lost. The railroad through Sumter County was destroyed and Sumter was
eventually garrisoned with federal troops. The magnates in Manning and Sumter
were none too happy with Charlie and the military defense. The Manning
Methodist minister William Mood had preached secession but claimed to be too sick
to take up arms. On seeing the Confederate scouts ride into town, he told his
wife, "I hope they will commit no rash deed and involve those of us who
are left in trouble."[163] Charlie's escape from Manning involved
killing a federal scout, the first blood spilled during the invasion of the
middle country.[164] The federals retaliated by burning down
the Manning courthouse, jail, academy and warehouses filled with cotton and
corn, a loss valued at $100,000.[165] The federals took similar measures
against Sumter for its defense at Dingle's Mill. One of the defenders
commented:

It was all our fault. If we had not tried
to stop five thousand men with pop-guns and school-boys, the Yankees would not
have meddled with our stuff.[166]

During
the war Lizzie Jones and the David children had farmed corn, hogs, and garden
crops at Cain Savannah and in 1864 on the 15 acre lot in town. After the war
the Joneses took advantage of the disruption in the monopoly system to try to
increase their market farming. This meant sharecropping, going into debt, and
devoting a large proportion of acreage to cash crops. For example, in the
spring of 1867 they borrowed $2,000 from Sumter merchant Leonard G. Pate (b.
1827) to plant a cotton crop on the land of the widow, Anna Bradford. In
exchange for the loan a lien was given on the crop. One-third of the crop went
to pay for the loan and another third went to the landlord.[167] The following April 1868 the Joneses
made a loan of $1,000 to plant another crop.[168] Because of low cotton prices, the loans
could not be repaid. The Joneses filed for bankruptcy in the federal court at
Charleston in July 1868.[169] They lost their 144 acre Cain Savannah
farm, which was sold to Collin G. Parker of Jefferson Co., Va. for $450.[170] Despite the bankruptcy they continued to
plant for the market. The following spring of 1869 they borrowed $200 cash at
12% per year and $50 worth of supplies to plant their 15 acre plot in Sumter
town. In return they gave a lien for $350.[171] In October 1869 they bought a 100 acre
farm from the Sumter blacksmith Thomas Coghlan, which they had to deed away a
few months later.[172] In January 1870 they got a loan for
$1000 to plant a cotton crop.[173] In the spring of 1871 they borrowed $600
to plant a crop.[174] Each time they took out a loan, they
gave a lien on the crop or on their other possessions. In 1871 in exchange for
a loan they gave a lien on their cotton lint (1 bail weighing 466 lbs.), 1 bay
horse, 1 bay mare mule and 44 stockhogs. According to the 1870 census, The
Jones farm was worth $1,000 and their personal property was worth $500.[175]

In
the war years the Joneses had no further children, but in 1866 they had a girl
and then two other children in 1869 and 1873. The two youngest David children
(ages 15 and 17) in 1865 were still under the Jones' roof. In 1874 the family
cut back on market farming. In his study of postbellum economics, Robert Pace
talks of the farmers being forced into a cycle of planting more and more cotton
and getting lower and lower prices. However, the Stafford-Jones experience
shows that this was not unique to the postbellum era, but reflects the nature
of capitalism.[176] After 1875 Charlie became a butcher in
Sumter. He also worked as a keeper of the Sumter jail during his later years.
Living in the Jones' house on S. Main St. in 1880 were Charlie (age 49), Lizzie
(age 49), Mary E. (age 14), Joseph H. (age 11) and Elerbe H. (age 7). Also in
the house was their oldest son, Thomas M. (age 25) and his wife, Hattie
Bradford Jones (age 20).[177] Lizzie died at age 56 in 1887. Charlie
died 4 years later at age 58 in Sept. 1891. They were buried in unmarked graves
in Sumter Cemetery.[178]

II-a.)
Relations with State and Federal
Government. Like the antebellum Stafford-Joneses, the domestic golden rule
established by the Civil War era Jones families optimized their labor and its
return. The challenge to family government, as earlier, was the hostility of
the economic system. In the war period labor's parallel government took
advantage of the disruption. Their agrarian reform and public service program
achieved a voice in the state legislature that had not existed earlier. More
specifically, after the Confederacy's surrender in April 1865, the federals
appointed a provisional governor, a constitutional convention was called and a
new legislature and governor were elected and met in November 1865. The new
legislature was dominated by the old Democratic Party. It refused to
enfranchise the black majority and enacted a Black Code that aimed to
re-enslave the blacks. U.S. General Daniel Sickles, who dictated politics in
Columbia voided the code in January 1866. At the order of the U.S. Congress, a
second constitutional convention was held in Charleston from January 14, 1868
to March 17, 1868. It wrote a second constitution that was ratified on April
14-16, 1868.[179]

There
were 124 delegates to the 1868 Charleston convention, a majority of whom were
black.[180] Of the 48 white delegates, most were
laboring people.[181] Among them was Sumter's Thomas J.
Coghlan (1803-1885), the blacksmith quoted at the start of this study.[182] He was an advocate for labor and had had
its votes in the Sumter offices to which he was elected over a 25 year period.[183] In the 1850s he was Sumter's intendant
(mayor). After the war he was elected by white and black voters as the chair of
the county Union Republican Party. He was also elected as a Republican delegate
to the 1868 Constitutional Convention and then to the state senate. Between
1868 and 1872 he served simultaneously as Sumter's sheriff, county treasurer
and U.S. deputy marshall.[184]

The
1868 constitution resulted in the election of a new legislature which met in
the fall of 1868 that for the first time was based entirely on population.[185] The requirement that the legislature be
based on population helped labor capture the legislature from the low-country
landlords.[186] Coghlan pointed this advantage out on
Feb. 14, 1868 at the Constitutional Convention when the provision was being
considered:

In former days the low country swayed and
influenced the power of the state entirely. A few parishes, with a white
population only sufficient for a small tea party, were represented by one or
two senators.[187]

The
South Carolina 1790 constitution had restricted membership in the legislature
to those who possessed 500 acres and 10 slaves or real property worth 500 pounds.[188] Half of the Republicans in the 1868
legislature, including Coghlan, were those whose main assets were their muscles
and brains.[189] Nevertheless, the Sumter Republicans,
like those at the national level, were split along class lines.[190] The split between capital and labor
included the blacks.[191] As Lou Faulkner Williams remarked:

Important class differences among the
Republicans divided the party on many issues. Legislators from the prosperous
antebellum free mulatto class tended to hold values that differed widely from
those of the former slaves; their conservatism on economic issues often aligned
them against other blacks.[192]

Despite the class divisions, labor made
gains. These gains were reported by Coghlan and the other delegates at mass meetings
of thousands of their Sumter constituents.[193]

II-b.)Agrarian
Reform. Agrarian reform was a priority for Sumter County's laboring people
in the Civil War period. As one Sumter delegate pointed out at the 1868
convention:

In my district not one in two thousand
laboring men can buy an acre of land. I say they have not the money. I come to
this convention desiring relief for the entire people of the state.[194]

One of the first agrarian reforms pushed
by labor's parallel government and from which the Joneses benefited, was
confiscatory land taxation. Land taxation had begun to increase in the 1850s
during the military buildup and shot up 15 times over earlier rates during the
war.[195] Capital had been willing to be taxed to
fund their war. They were not happy when the 1868 legislature imposed similar
taxes. These taxes aimed to strip them of their land and to pay for public
services. Lou Faulkner Williams summarized labor's strategy:

The radicals legislated high taxes in a
deliberate effort to redistribute land to the freemen. The Republicans expected
the high taxes on unused land to force property on the market so the state
could purchase it for resale or so private individuals could buy it.[196]

Some
magnates complained that they had idle land because they could force neither
the blacks nor the whites to work it. This meant no revenue, an inability to
pay taxes and forfeiture. Forfeited land was auctioned off for as little as a
dollar per acre.[197] Low cotton prices also helped the land
redistribution. Between 1860 and 1870 the average value of South Carolina land
fell from $10 per acre to $4 per acre and the number of landowners increased
from 33,000 to 51,000, while the average size of farms fell from 488 to 233
acres.[198] The Joneses benefited from the reduced
land costs.[199] After her mother died in 1875, Videau
bought in her own name some of the 60 acre farm, which was in her mother's
estate. The Joneses had been working the farm as sharecroppers for 10 years.
Videau had 7 brothers and sisters who also had an interest in the estate. The
reduced cost of the land helped Videau buy out the interests of some of her
siblings.[200]

A
second agrarian measure was the regulation of interest rates on crop loans.
Farmers to a greater or lesser degree obtained credit from merchants or
landlords until they could make a crop and liquidate their debts. To get the
loan the farmer had to give a lien or mortgage on the crop. The merchant
charged high interest rates, sometimes as much as 100% to 200% of cash value.
Much of the profits went to foreign banks and mercantile houses which carried
the local merchants. At the end of the year, on December 15, the farmer who had
done the work was lucky to have any surplus after settling up.[201] By 1877 the legislature had reduced the
rate on crop loans to a 7% maximum. A labor organization that backed
anit-usuary legislation was the National Grange of the Patrons of Husbandry.
The Grange was established in South Carolina in 1871. It had 10,000 South
Carolina members in 342 local granges.[202]

Another
program that benefited laboring people was the lien system enacted by the South
Carolina legislature in 1868 and 1869. It gave hired labor a lien on their
crops that was superior to all others. The Freedman's Bureau used the law to
seize crops held by merchants and landlords to distribute to those who raised
them.[203]

There
were several other land programs. One was a homestead exemption to protect
debtors. A prior exemption in the early 1850s had been eliminated in 1857. The
new exemption was included in the 1868 constitution.[204] It helped Charlie and Lizzie Jones keep
their house and get back on their feet when they filed for bankruptcy in 1868.[205] Sumter's Thomas Coghlan had been a
supporter of the homestead provision at the 1868 convention. On Jan. 17, 1868
it was pointed out to the convention that:

One of the greatest troubles in American
legislation has been in not protecting the homestead. It has made the American
people almost as great wanders as the arabs. When a farmer planted an orchard
or a vineyard, he had no assurance that 5 years thereafter the results of his
care and labor would not pass into the hands of strangers.[206]

II-c.)
Public Services. Besides land reform
the Joneses benefited during the Civil War period by increased public services.
The increased land taxation not only redistributed land but funded public
services. The budget for civilian public services had already been increased
starting with the war buildup. Capital was not able to force labor to do its
fighting without concessions. For example, war-widows were paid $16/year. A
widow with two children got $40/year.[207] Poorhouses and hospitals went up in each
county.[208] In addition to tax expenditures, which
rose from $1 million in 1861 to $2.2 million/year in 1865, the legislature
engaged in deficit spending.[209] Between 1868 and 1874 the public debt
rose from $5 to $20 million.[210]

The
postwar spending went toward programs such as roads, bridges, railroads, jails,
public schools, juvenile reform schools, county poorhouses for the blind, deaf
and elderly, hospitals and a state militia, all of which capital equated with
graft.[211] The 1868 state constitution for the
first time mandated free public education for all. Videau and Robert Jones
could not read or write, but their children all learned how.[212] In 1870 Robert's 15-year old, Robert
Frederick and his 14-year old, Mary, were still in school. His 17-year old was
employed as a farm laborer. In 1880 James Henry (Harry) Jones, age 6, the
youngest and only child of Robert and Videau Jones who lived to adulthood and
who ended up attending the University of South Carolina for a short period, was
just starting school.[213] The expansion of education also
benefited Hampton Watts, the father of Robert Jones' first wife. Nearing age
60, he took up school teaching in the 1860s.[214] Until the 1880s the public schools,
especially in rural areas, were racially mixed and a majority of the students,
reflecting the population, were black.[215] Those between the ages of 6 and 16 were required
to attend school 6 months per year.[216] The curriculum was orthography, reading,
writing, arithmetic, geography, English grammar, history of the United States,
history of the state, morals and good behavior. The schools were funded by the
legislature and by local taxes and a poll tax of $1.00.[217] County treasurer Thomas Coghlan, who
served between 1868 and 1872, reported in January 1872 that all taxes during
the period of his tenure had been collected, the school teachers had been fully
paid and the county was solvent.[218]

A
second public service that benefited some of the Joneses was the establishment
of the state-supported Sumter County poorhouse and an improved mental health
facility.[219] Charlie Jones' wife, Lizzie, for
example, was confined at public expense at the South Carolina Lunatic Asylum
for the last few months of her life.[220] The Asylum, which dated from the 1820s,
was given increased state support in the postbellum. Located at Columbia, in
the antebellum its revenue depended mainly on fees charged to the families and
counties which committed patients, with state funding secondary. After the war,
the funding came largely from the state legislature, the patient population
expanded by a factor of four and the focus turned to the more expensive job of
rehabilitating rather than warehousing patients.[221] The institution was racially mixed, with
a majority being black.

Lizzie's
mother-in-law, Barbary Jones also benefited from the improved post-war
services. The state-supported Sumter county poorhouse was located 4 miles
southeast of Providence on the way to Sumter. Barbary Jones was able to place
her long-term indigent border, Sarah Graham, in it.[222] Barbary was getting older and the
poorhouse relieved her from having this care. Others in the poorhouse in 1870 were
several white children (unrelated to Sarah)and 7 blacks, including a 101 year old male named Mack Lennes. The
live-in superintendents were Addison Troublefield (age 25) and his wife Julia.
The poor house generally had 60 cleared acres which were worked by able-bodied
residents and the superintendent. This provided enough corn to feed the
residents.[223]

A
benefit to married women from the 1868 constitution was a provision that gave
them the right to control their own property and that legalized divorce.[224] During the 1870s Videau Jones bought
some of the land which she and Robert were farming. She bought it in her name
alone. Similarly Barbary Jones sold her farm to her daughter-in-law alone in
1883. Putting land in the women's name could protect it against creditors or
against probate and legal fees where the husband was in poor health and likely
to pre-decease the spouse or where he was a drunkard (alcoholic).

The
expansion and improvement of the highway and railroad system was an achievement
of the 1868 legislature that made travel and trade easier for the Joneses.
County treasurer Coghlan reported that between 1868 and 1872, he had collected
$20,000 for Sumter's roads and bridges.[225] Although they complained about the
state's bonded indebtedness, Democratic magnates like former governor James Orr
and Confederate generals Martin Gary and Matthew Butler, joined their
Republican counterparts to promote and speculate in the state railroad bonds.[226] In the 1870s Thomas Coghlan built a
foundry and railway carts. He got a contract for railroad ties and built a
steam-powered, five-worker sawmill. He also made a wooden tramway from the mill
to the Sumter train depot. On it he transported lumber to market.[227] Robert L. Jones' son, Robert (Bob)
Frederick Jones worked at the mill for $.75/day. He lost half his right arm in
an accident there. In 1876 he had married his first cousin, Francis (Fannie)
Ellen Jones, the daughter of Charlie and Lizzie Jones.[228]

Another
type of state public service that benefited labor was the militia. During the
period that capital had dominated, the militia was used to keep black labor in
place. The Militia Law of 1869 armed, equipped and paid wages for a
racially-mixed 100,000-strong force. It kept the magnates in check.[229] In Sumter, as in most of the middle and
low country, blacks were in the majority. Neither their violence, racism nor
promises of benevolence were able to gain electoral victory for Sumter's
Democrats. Initially the Klan burned several businesses of white Republicans in
Sumter.[230] But the Sumter Klan was broken up by
Sumter's militia, Union League and Sheriff Thomas Coghlan.[231] The Sumter News referred to Coghlan as
the "Ku Klux Exterminator."[232] In 1868 the magnates could not beat him
at the polls, nor could they effectively engage in criminal activity.[233]

Conclusion. The Stafford-Jones' golden
rule centered on labor and maximized its return by agrarian reform and public
services. It minimized market farming, borrowing and consumerist fetishes, such
as spending for luxuries, alcoholism, gambling, gluttony and sexual
promiscuity. The disruption of the Civil War permitted their parallel
government to make gains at the state level. Historians who have perpetuated
the assumption that the capitalist government was the only one accepted by "all
classes and races of society" are out of touch with the Stafford-Joneses
and the South Carolina majority.[234]

Capital,
and those dominated by it among the preachers, media and politicians, always
maintained that labor was denigrating.[235] But the Stafford-Joneses boasted of
their labor in the public record.[236] In their view it was the brains and
muscles of whites and blacks who worked side by side in the fields that were
the South's economic, spiritual and sometimes governmental backbone.[237] Historians like James Allen are mistaken
in accepting the capitalist government as the only one. Writing from the
federal government perspective, Allen maintained that in the antebellum era,
the U.S. became "the slave of the 300,000 slaveowners who ruled the
south."[238] By 1856, in Allen's view, the southern
magnates had imposed a type of reverse-carpetbagger domination over both houses
of the U.S. Congress, the president, the cabinet, seven of the nine justices of
the Supreme Court and all the principal committees in the Senate. All were
owners of plantations or sympathetic to slavery. Though capital dominated
federal politics and much of the media, clergy and educators, it could not
dominate the laboring people. When labor got partial control, as during
reconstruction, its government was as violent and destructive against capital
as capital had been against labor.[239] It needed to make no concessions, unlike
capital, which was unable to exist without labor. As antebellum magnate George
Fitzhugh put it in 1857, "Your capital will not buy you an income of a
cent, nor supply one of your wants, without labor."[240]

Because
capital dominated at the federal level did not mean it dominated labor.
Similarly, at the state government level, it is a distortion to focus only on the
power of the magnates. Illustrative of this tendency was Ralph Wooster's study
of South Carolina's "all powerful" state legislature. He wrote:

The Constitution of 1790 under which
South Carolinians were governed for more than 70 years created a highly unified,
centralized system of government almost entirely devoid of checks and balances.
All real power rested in the legislature, which was "a sort of House of
Commons in the extent of its power." Not only did the legislature have the
usual lawmaking powers, but it also elected the governor, presidential
electors, U.S. senators, state judges, the secretary of state, commissioners of
the treasury, the surveyor general and most local officials. Thus, executive,
judicial and administrative functions of the state government were in the hands
of the legislative branch.[241]

In the thinking of the Stafford-Joneses,
they themselves were the ones who exercised "real power" in governing
their lives. Their land and labor gave them power; the legislature and the
magnates they perceived as on the periphery.

Another
error emerges from minimizing labor's parallel government and focusing only on
the federal or state government. That mistake is to attribute to labor
attitudes such as racism, states' rights and fear-mongering -- the weapons used
by capital against labor. From the Stafford-Jones perspective, it was not the
blacks who were monopolizing the land or restricting public education, decent
roads, services and industrial growth -- it was the magnates. The 1868 legislature,
and labor's golden rule generally, were dominated, if anything, by class, not
racial, conflict.[242] For example, at the 1868 Constitutional
Convention, Sumter delegate Coghlan had the sergeant-at-arms on Jan. 29, 1868
permanently evict R. T. Logan from the convention. Logan was the reporter for
the Charleston Mercury. The Mercury was the mouth-piece of the
magnates in the Democratic Party and edited by secessionist R. B. Rhett. Its
main tactic was race-baiting against labor.[243] On Jan. 31, 1868, several days after the
Mercury's eviction Coghlan proposed
that the constitution include a provision against racial crimes. His proposal
read in part:

Whereas, the prosperity of the state,
like that of families, depends on the harmony existing among its members, and
the precepts of true religion teach us to do unto others as we would they
should do unto us. . .

Resolved that this convention take such action as
it may in its wisdom deem compatible with its powers, and conductive to the
public weal, to expunge forever from the vocabulary of South Carolina, the
epithets "negro," "nigger," and "yankee," as used
in an opprobrious sense.

Resolved, that the exigencies and approved
civilization of the times demand that this convention, or the legislative body
created by it, enact such laws as will make it a penal offence to use the above
epithets in the manner described against an American citizen of this state, and
to punish the insult by fine or imprisonment.[244]

Laboring
people did not generally advocate racism but rather used race to help promote
labor unity. Typically, the blacks at the 1868 convention were split along
class lines on most issues, with black capital opposing labor's program. In
order to get the backing of black capital, labor appealed to black racial
solidarity by emphasizing the disproportionally greater benefits which the
blacks received from "class legislation," as it was called. The use
of race by Thomas Coghlan and Franklin Moses to gain enactment of a homestead
provision employed this tactic:

Mr. F. J. MOSES, Jr. Many have bought
property since the close of the war. I beg you to remember that on almost all
the land bought by colored men, since the close of the war, very little of it
has been paid for. To make the homestead prospective only, would sweep almost
every colored man, who owns a homestead, from his possession. I know that in my
District it would be so. The other delegate from Sumter, I know, can
substantiate that statement.

Mr. T.J. COGHLAN. I know that what you
state is true.

Mr. F. J. MOSES, Jr. . . . I say, if you
make this law prospective only, you hurt the colored man more than you hurt the
white man because there are thousands of schemes by which the colored man may
be deprived of his home. The white men are always smart enough to employ
lawyers to do everything for them, smart enough, as a great many of them
heretofore have been, to avoid the penalty of their just debts. They can avoid
the Sheriff, but when the Sheriff comes to the colored man he has no sympathy
for him. He says the white people don't want you to have lands anyhow. You have
got it by your industry, perseverance and honesty, but we are determined to
take it from you, and you will whistle for it when you get it again.[245]

Racism
had no place in the politics of labor. Similarly, states' rights and secession
were not part of their program. Unionist politician Benjamin Perry stated at
the time, that secession and states' rights got endorsed by many politicians,
media, clergy and educators, not because it was a reflection of the laboring
majority, but because capital exempted them from conscription and gave them a
comfortable living.[246] Perry's biographer remarked:

Especially did he indict the clergy,
newspaper editors, and politicians who had been largely instrumental in
bringing on the conflict and were now exempted from service. The clergy, he
said, in their zeal to plunge the country into war had departed from every
principle of Christian religion.[247]

Perry
observed that the magnates turned their states' rights and racist rhetoric off
and on as it suited their class interests - not unlike their modern-day
descendent, Strom Thurmond. At the time that Charlie Jones and others were
involved in armed combat against the federals, Sumter magnate John N. Frierson
(1818-1887) was entertaining the same federal troops. Frierson and his wife,
who was from the north and a friend of federal General Edward Potter, had him
to dinner on the evening of April 19, 1865 at Cherryvale, their Stateburg
plantation.[248] Frierson was a force in the county
Democratic Party. In late 1860 he had encouraged Sumter's 150 minute men to
organize the visit of secessionist Edmund Ruffin of Virginia to speak at the
Sumter County courthouse. It was at that meeting that delegates to South
Carolina's secession convention in December 1860 were selected.[249] Fierson himself did no military service.

The
Stafford-Jones parallel government worked for labor rights, not states' rights.[250] It is true they had little loyalty to
the federal government, which was hostile to labor. Nevertheless, states'
rights and the Civil War were not their issues. They ended up in the
Confederate army because they were coerced. Even then, they fought the war on
their own terms. Landowners like John C. Calhoun and states' rights politics are
often made symbols of the south, but a more realistic symbol would be the
Stafford-Jones golden rule.

Besides
capitalist reductionism, there is another school that does not reconstruct an
accurate picture of southern history. Some feminist historians, ignoring
labor's parallel government, have argued that 19th-century South Carolina women
had no political power. Illustrative is Victoria Bynum, who wrote that poor
females without a white male guardian were "without honor in the
antebellum south."[251] One need only ask, from whose
perspective were they without honor? Capital was blind to race and gender. All
labor in its view was without honor. On the other hand, from the view of
labor's golden rule, the idle landlords, including women landlords, had no
honor. Those with honor and power in labor's parallel government, in the eyes
of Charity Stafford and Barbary Jones, were themselves. They were
self-sufficient and carried their own weight. High mortality and female-headed
households were neither an anomaly nor a source of pathology. Academics are
often critical of antebellum laboring people for not rising up against a system
which was hostile to their families and their labor, but this interpretation
does no justice to labor's accomplishments.[252] Social revolution and egalitarian
societies are rare. Feminist history provides few examples. Under hard
conditions, the maintenance of a parallel government was rational and
effective. It was the only option! In the disruption of the Civil War, labor
took advantage of the class fissures of the moment, rose up and made gains.[253]

[4]Joshua got the land in 1797 as the result
of a state grant which was signed by the federalist Governor Charles Pickney.
See "Grant to Joshua Stafford" (Dec. 4, 1797), State Grant Book (Sumter Co. Courthouse, Sumter, S.C.) [hereafter,
SCC], vol. 43, p. 235. Both the Staffords and the Jones were originally from
Virginia according to a Revolutionary War pension application claim, No. R
7934, U.S. Archives, Wash. D.C., filed on Feb. 2, 1854 by Elizabeth J. Jones
(b. 1805). Elizabeth Jones was a daughter of William Jones (1764-1809) and Ann
(Freeman) Jones (1763-1847). The claim was based on William's military service.
One witness who furnished an affidavit concerning William's service was William
Vaughn (b. 1765), a Revolutionary pensioner (U.S. Archives, certificate no.
23,437). In Vaughn's affidavit (National Archives, microfilm, p. 421) is the
statement about Joshua Stafford and William Jones coming from Virginia:

Deponent has no
acquaintance or knowledge of but one William Jones who served in Sumter.
Although deponent was very young at the period when or sometime after the
period that William Jones referred to came with other Continental soldiers,
names Joshua Stafford, John Pollard, John Peek and many others whose names he
cannot now recollect without having their names called; that said persons came
with General [Nathaniel] Green from Virginia to the aid of South Carolina, that
said Jones married one Ann Freeman, one or two years before the deponent joined
the army in 1780 and came to reside with his family within 1 1/2 miles of where
deponent's father resided in Sumter District.

See also, Lenora Sweeney, Amherst
County, Virginia in the Revolution (Greenville, S.C.: Southern
Historical Press, 1998), pp. 144-145 (abstract of the William Jones Pension
application); Billy Jones (Myrtlewood, Ala.) and Ralph McCathern (Sumter,
S.C.), Notes on the Jones-Freeman Family
(Sumter, S.C.: Manuscript, 1999). There was a Stafford family in the Beaufort
District of South Carolina. George M. Stafford in General
Leroy A. Stafford: His Forbears and Descendents (New Orleans,
La.: Pelican Pub., 1943), p. 18, published the speculation of a Stafford
descendent, Walter Elvin Stafford, living in the 1940s in Columbia, S.C. that
the Sumter Staffords descended from the Beaufort Staffords. But Walter Stafford
had no documentation and was unaware of William Vaughn's affidavit in William
Jones pension file.

[5]Middle country laboring people used the
terms farm and farmer, not planter and plantation, in referring to themselves.
They seem not to have wanted to ape the landlords. See Stephanie McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds: Yeomen Households,
Gender Relations, and the Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina
Low Country (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 285.

[7]The extent of the benefit can be gauged
by looking at the typical farm budget. Small farmers made cash incomes
averaging $150/year from the production of corn, wheat and pork. This was the
same as a laborer's wages, which were $.50/day or $150/year. See U.S. Bureau of
Labor Statistics, History of Wages in the
U.S. from Colonial Times to 1928 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1934), p. 225;
Elmer Johnson (ed.), South Carolina: A
Documentary Profile of the Palmetto State (Columbia, S.C.: University of
South Carolina Press, 1971), p. 263. The addition of a cotton crop often
doubled the income of these small farmers. In the 1790s with the first wide-spread
use of the rolling gin, the farm price for short-staple cotton rose from near
zero to $.30/lb. A farmer with little capital could make $300/year by growing
1000 lbs of cotton (3 bales) on seven acres of land. See Lewis Gray, History of Agriculture in the Southern U.S.
to 1860 (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institute, 1933), vol. 2, p. 681; Louis
Wright, South Carolina: A Bicentennial
History (New York: W.W. Norton, 1976), pp. 149-150.

[8]In March the father and son harrowed the
cotton and corn fields and the women planted and hoed. In June the women
thinned out the cotton. In July the whole family hoed corn and thinned the
cotton fields. The children went to school in August and part of September, but
by September 15 the cotton opened up. The whole family picked from then until
November 30. January and February were for raking manure on the fields, mending
fences and cutting down and picking up corn stalks. See James Sloan, Journals (June 24, 1854 to Mar. 27,
1861), South Carolina Library, Columbia, S.C. See also, Plowden Weston,
"Management of a Southern Plantation," DeBow's Review (New Orleans), vol. 32 (1857), 38-40; Orville
Burton, In My Father's House are Many
Mansions: Family and Community in Edgefield, S.C. (Chapel Hill, N.C.:
University of North Carolina, 1985), pp. 5, 10, 12, 47, 131, 191, 199.

[11]"Will of Joshua Stafford," Wills (SCC), Bundle 101, package 2. In
the 1800 census the family owned no slaves. The family does not appear in the
1810 census. See U.S. Census Office, "Manuscript Population Schedules of
the Second Census of the United States, 1800: Sumter (Claremont) County,
S.C.," (Wash. D.C.: National Archives Microfilm Publications, 1965)
[hereafter U.S. Census, 1800], p.
885; U.S. Census, 1810
(Sumter County, S.C.).

[12]Table 1 in the appendix illustrates a
hypothetical budget using data from Charity's farm.

[13]Lunsford Stafford was already emancipated
at the time of his father's death. He had married in 1813 and farmed rented
land in Providence. By 1821 with three small children, he took Hannah as his
inheritance from his father's estate. Hartwell Stafford ended up in Wilkinson
County, Mississippi, where he married Elizabeth Turberville in 1828. To fill in
for Hannah and Hartwell, Charity's three minor children did more work. See
"Ruben Long et al," Equity Court Rolls
(SCC), Old Series no. 441. Two years later Charity also bought a "Negro
girl" named Judia for $400. See ibid.;
"Estate of Charity Stafford" (Feb. 16, 1839), Wills
(SCC), Bundle 132, package 2. In time Judia had a son named Bluford.

[20]Quoted in Laura Edwards, Gendered Strife and Confusion: The
Political Culture of Reconstruction (Urbana, Ill.: University of
Illinois, 1997), p. 150.

[21]Louis Wright in South Carolina, pp. 106-109, describes the aping of the English
gentry by the South Carolina landlords and merchants. They imported English
furniture, silver, linen, pictures, architecture, politics, religion and
beliefs about alcohol and labor.

[22]Elijah Stafford ended up in East
Feliciana Parish, Louisiana and later Livingston Parish. See Stafford, General Leroy A. Stafford,
p. 18. Typical of the $39 debt young Elijah owed to Stuart Dutton's general
store in Providence was:

January 5, 1825, one
quart whiskey ($.35); January 15, one bottle of whiskey ($.37), one coffee pot
(8), one-fourth pound tobacco, one-half Port Brandy ($.58); February 7, two
ginger cakes ($.12), fine tooth comb (18); March 4, three bottles of whiskey;
March 15, one set tea spoons; March 28, one quart whiskey; April 16, one Turk
cap (37); April 17, one ribbon, calico, one loaf sugar; May 13, sugar and coffee;
June 4, pocket knife ($1.50), one tobacco, one razor, one fancy handkerchief,
one pair kid gloves; August 31, one pint whiskey; September 6, one razor, one
razor strop, one pint whiskey; September 12, pad lock; September 2, four skiems
silk, one-half pint whisky, one tobacco. See "Elijah Stafford &
Charity, Sarah, James Stafford v. Stuart Dutton" (1827), Equity Court Rolls (SCC), Old Series no.
436.

[23]"Ruben Long et al," Equity Court Rolls (SCC), Old Series no.
441. In general an estate (both profit and principle) devised to a child went
to raise the child. If anything was left, it went to the child on coming of
age. See Jacob Wheeler, A Practical
Treatise of the Law of Slavery (New York: Negro Universities Press, [1837],
1968), p. 185.

[24]"Ruben Long et al," Equity Court Rolls (SCC), Old Series no.
441. The doctor bills which Charity had to pay for James and Sarah "were
considerable."

[26]James and Marianna Stafford had 11
children, none of whom learned to read or write. Charity Stafford willed the
farm to James' infant daughter "for the benefit of her father." See
"Estate of Charity Stafford," Wills
(SCC), Bundle 132, no. 2. By 1870 James had died. His widow, Mariann (age 53)
and 6 of his 11 children (ages 10 to 21) were running the farm. See U.S. Census, 1870 (Sumter County, S.C.),
roll 1509, p. 173. In 1880 Mariann (age 64), her son Hartwell (age 32) and his
wife and 4 children, plus several of Mariann's other children were running the
farm. See U.S. Census, 1880
(Sumter County, S.C.), p. 198.

Charity's son Lunsford Stafford, aged 50 or older, was a
widower by 1840 but still farming in Providence. He had no slaves.
Single-handedly he was also acting as the foster parent of a grandson, who was
less than 5 years old. Lunsford was in poor health and died in 1842. Lunsford
had three adult daughters in Sumter Co., two of whom married about 1840.
Juliann (age 25) married a carpenter, Jesse Allen. Marian (age 24) married a
boot and shoemaker, Benjamin Folsom. Placida married William Duncan. See U.S. Census, 1840
(Sumter County, S.C.), roll 515, p. 8.

[27]"Deed of Tyre Jennings to Eli
Jones" (Dec. 7, 1830), Deed Books
(SCC), Book H, p. 439; "Estate of Eli Jones" (1839), Wills (SCC), Bundle 113, package 13;
"Deed to Robert F. Jones" (1891), Deed
Books (SCC), Book DDD, p. 580. On the east the farm was bounded by
Providence Methodist church to which the family belonged. Barbary and a number
of her descendants were buried in the church's cemetery. A federal soldier who
camped out on the night of Apr. 15-16, 1865 at a site (crossroads of old U.S.
Highway 521 & S.C. Highway 441) about 400 yards from the farm described the
area as "hilly and rolling country sparsely settled with poor
whites." See Luis F. Emilio, A Brave Black
Regiment: The History of the 54th Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry,
1863-1865 (New York: DeCapo, [1890] 1995), p. 299; Allan Thigpen
(ed.), The Illustrated Recollections of
Potter's Raid, Apr. 5-21, 1865 (Sumter: Gamecock City Printing,
1998), p. 524.

[28]"Estate of Eli Jones" (1839), Wills (SCC), Bundle 113, package 13.
Like the Staffords after 1825, and like most other laboring people, the Jones,
both before and after Eli's death, emphasized production for self-consumption
as much as for the market. One-half the South Carolina cotton growers in the
1850s produced only one bale each. See Philip Racine (ed.), Piedmont Farmer: The Journals of David
Golightly Harris, 1855-1870 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee
Pres, 1990), p. 2. Cash crops and dependence on the market for manufactured
goods were believed by laboring people to be inequitable and dangerous for
small farmers, who had to go into debt to plant. A poor harvest, drop in
produce prices or rise in the price of manufactured goods resulted in frequent
bankruptcy and the loss of the farms during the 1840s and 1850s. See Anne
Gregorie, History of Sumter County
(Sumter, S.C.: Library Board of Sumter, 1954), pp. 165-166, 233; Charles
Bolton, Poor Whites of the Antebellum South:
Tenants and Laborers in Central North Carolina and Northwest Mississippi
(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994), p. 24; Rachael Klein,
"Unification of a Slave State: The Rise of the Plantation Class in the
South Carolina Backcountry: 1760-1808" (Ph.D. dissertation, Yale
University, 1979), pp. 288-291. Besides cash crops of cotton and corn, the
Jones raised hogs which they slaughtered and cured in a home-made smoke house.
They sold bacon to R. Solomon's general store in Providence for $1.75 per slab
($.10/lb.). See "Administratrix's Report of Barbary Jones" (Nov. 7,
1845) in "Estate of Eli Jones" (1839), Wills
(SCC), Bundle 113, package 13. Since they frequently purchased goods from the
general store, they got little cash from their produce but rather credits
against purchases. Barbary contracted with Ozias Mathias, a neighbor, to build
a chimney for $3 in the addition. The Jones' typical expenses in 1845 included
the blacksmith who got $.93 for one job, W.F. Wright who was paid for work done
in his "shop," Noah Graham, who was a clergyman and tutor, John
Ballard, Wm. Bell and H. Watts. Barbary paid $11 to her brother, James Stafford
for "sundries." See "Administratrix's Report of Barbary
Jones" (Nov. 7, 1845) in "Estate of Eli Jones" (1839), Wills (SCC), Bundle 113, package 13.

[32]"Estate of Charity Stafford,"
Bundle 132, no. 2. If they were similar to other slave families in the area,
they lived in a two room house with a shed porch. They had their own poultry
and garden. Part of their produce they consumed themselves and part they sold
or bartered. John Drayton in A View of
South Carolina as Respects her Natural and Civil Concerns (Charleston: W.P.
Young, 1802), p. 145, wrote that "slaves are encouraged to plant for
emolument; raise poultry for their own use or for sale; and are protected in
the property they thus acquire." See also, Robert Olwell, Masters, Slaves and Subjects: The Culture of
Power in the South Carolina Low Country, 1740-1790 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1998), p. 204; Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), p. 177.

A contract made by a slave was not enforceable in a court.
But slaves had their own system for exacting accountability. Their tactics
included faking injury and illness, work slow downs, theft, arson, injury to
animals, poisoning and suicide. If a husband was sold away from his family, it
was common for him to take the law into his own hands, abscond and return to
his family. A. J. McElveen, Broke by the War:
Letters of a Slave Trader, ed. Edmund Drago (Columbia, S.C.:
University of South Carolina Press, 1991), pp. 20, 43, 86, 128, lists frequent
runaways and other resistance. If owners wanted work done, they had to pay:
food, clothing, shelter, including liquor and cash. Typically in 1849 South
Carolina enacted a law requiring that slaves be properly fed. This was not out
of benevolence but because of slave militancy, as the assembly stated, "It
is necessary to protect property from the depredation of famished slaves."
See Wheeler, A Practical Treatise of the
Law of Slavery, p. 196; Jenny Wahl, The
Bondsman's Burden: An Economic Analysis of the Common Law of Southern Slavery
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 149. For similar reasons
(slave-owner self-protection), the selling of children away from their mother
was outlawed. For example, in probate cases whoever got the mother in a
division of property also got the children. The person that got the mother had
to compensate the other heirs for the cost of the children. See Wheeler, A Practical Treatise of the Law of Slavery,
p. 188. Table 2 in the appendix illustrates a hypothetical family budget for
1840 using data from the Jones' farm.

[37]See Gregorie, History of Sumter County, p. 229; McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds, p. 253.

[38]Less frequently they went in the wagon to
Sumterville for Sunday school and services at the First Methodist Episcopal
Church (later called Trinity) or to the other evangelical churches (Baptist,
Presbyterian) when a special preacher would visit. An interdenominational,
interracial week-long camp meeting was held yearly in the fall at the
Providence Springs campground. Providence Springs was located at the crossroads
of old U.S. Highway 521 and S.C. Highway 441, near the present Hillcrest
School. This is also near Providence Methodist Church. See Nichols, Historical Sketches of Sumter County,
vol. 2, pp. 333, 420-421; Racine (ed.), Piedmont
Farmer, p. 9; Gregorie, History of
Sumter County, p. 223; Dickson D. Bruce, And They All Sang Hallelujah: Plain-Folk Camp-Meeting Religion,
1800-1845 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1974), p. 75; Ford, Origins of Southern Radicalism, p. 25;
Porcher G. Rembert in "The Bradford Springs," The Illustrated Recollections of Potter's Raid, p. 510.

Even after the children had grown up and had their own
families, Barbary helped them in difficult times. By 1870 her daughter
Elizabeth Charity (Jones) Barkley (age 39), who had married William R. Barkley,
was a single parent with three children and living in an outbuilding on the Jones'
farm. See U.S. Census, 1870 (Sumter
County, S.C.), roll 1509, p. 186.
Barbary also provided housing for several indigents. In both the 1850 and 1860
census Betsie (Elizabeth) Jones (age 47 and age 57) was living in an
outbuilding on the Jones' farm. Betsie was Eli's sister. See U.S. Census, 1860 (Sumter County, S.C.),
p. 152. Living with Betsie in 1860 were 4 orphaned children (aged 10 to 22) of
her first cousin, James and Mary Freeman. They had died in the 1850s.

[39]The monopolistic control of the government
was resented by the white majority. The 1808 state constitution, which based
representation half on property and half on the white population, gave thirty
men in a low county parish as much weight in the legislature as 3500 small
farmers in the middle country. A farmer-politician criticized the constitution:

The constitution of
South Carolina is more aristocratic in its fundamental principles than that of
any other state in the union. The basis of representation in this state is as
unwise and as anti-republican as it is possible for it to be. [Benjamin Perry
quoted in Lillian Kibler, Benjamin Perry,
South Carolina Unionist (Durham: Duke University Press, 1946), p. 229].

Patrick Brady,
"Political and Civic Life in South Carolina 1787-1833," (Ph.D. dissertation,
University of California at Santa Barbara, 1971), p. 196, described South
Carolina's political-economic division in the antebellum:

The main economic
division within South Carolina was not between competing market interests but between
those who were and those who were not part of the market economy. Farmers. . .
were simply neglected.

[40]Gustavus Myers, History
of the Great American Fortunes (Chicago: C.H. Kerr & Co.,
1910).

[41]Gray, History
of Agriculture, vol. 2, p. 611. Throughout the antebellum the south was the
leading agriculture region of the United States. It had 30% of the land and 40%
of the population but produced all the cotton, rice, sugar, sweet potatoes, 85%
of the tobacco, half the corn and 30% of the wheat and rye.

[42]Charity's son Elijah Stafford ended up in
East Feliciana Parish, Louisiana. Son Hartwell migrated to Wilkinson County,
Mississippi. Son Lunsford C. Stafford lost his property as the result of a
sheriff's sale in 1833. See "Deed of Lunsford C. Stafford to Sheriff
William G. Richards" (1833), Deed
Books (SCC), Book I, no. 41. Grandson Washington Nicholas Jones (b. 1828)
moved to Bonneau in Berkeley Co., S.C. where he worked on the railroad and
farmed. Granddaughter Juliann Stafford (Allen) (b. 1815) married a carpenter,
lived in the town of Sumter, and raised 8 children. Granddaughter Marian
Stafford (Folsom) (b. 1816) married a boot and shoe maker and raised 4 children
in the town of Sumter.

[43]Brady, "Political and Civic Life in
South Carolina 1787-1833," p. 120, table 10. Between 1800 and 1810 some
49,000 left the state.

[44]Michael Johnson and James Roark, Black Masters: A Free Family of Color
in the Old South (New York: Norton & Co., 1984), p. 339.

[45]In 1810 54% of the whites in the Camden
district owned no slaves and 20% owned from 1 to 4 slaves. See Klein, Unification of a Slave State, pp.
296-297.

[49]Alfred Hunt, Haiti's Influence on Antebellum America: Slumbering Volcano in the
Caribbean (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988). South
Carolina's most famous slave revolt was in 1822. Thirty-five were hanged and
thirty-two deported. Included among the revolutionaries were four whites. The
revolt leader, Denmark Vesey, was a Methodist. The goal was to liberate
Charleston with the help of Haiti and the north. See John Lofton, Insurrection in South Carolina: The
Turbulent World of Denmark Vesey (Yellow Springs, Ohio: Antioch Press,
1964). Another slave conspiracy and trial took place just up the road from
Sumterville in Camden in 1816. See Steven Channing, Crisis
of Fear: Secession in South Carolina (New York: Simon &
Schuster, 1970), p. 21; Gregorie, History
of Sumter County, p. 133.

[50]Quoted in Brady, "Political and
Civic Life in South Carolina," p. 128.

[52]Kibler, Benjamin
Perry, pp. 218-219. The great nullifier himself, John Calhoun,
had voted as a member of the U.S. Congress in 1816 for a protective tariff. See
Wright, South Carolina, p. 163.

[53]McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds, pp. 253, 267; Sumter Gazette article, reprinted in Charleston
Mercury (Sept. 13, 1830 & Sept. 14, 1830). Despite
small-farmer opposition, South Carolina big landowners and merchants held a
nullification convention in November 1832 and adopted the Ordinance of
Nullification, which declared the federal tariffs of 1828 and 1832 null and
void. They warned that any attempt to collect it would result in secession.
About the same time there was a minor battle in the streets of Sumterville
between the nullifiers and those who were questioning the slave system, such as
the readers of the Sumterville Southern Whig newspaper. See Gregorie, History of Sumter County,
pp. 149-150; Freehling, The Nullification
Era, p. xii; William Freehling, Prelude
to the Civil War: The Nullification Controversy in South Carolina, 1816-1836
(New York: Harper, 1965), pp. 83-85.

[54]Jenny Wahl, The
Bondsman's Burden: An Economic Analysis of the Common Law of Southern Slavery
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 170, 259.

[55]In 1838 Texas, then dominated by small
farmers who had been evicted from their farms in South Carolina and elsewhere,
enacted the first homestead exemption law. It protected 50 acres of land and
$500 worth of improvements from seizure for debt. See Bolton, Poor Whites, p. 82.

[56]Ford, Origins
of Southern Radicalism, pp. 322-323, speaks of the intense
popular hostility toward banks, financiers and money lenders. In 1857 the
"usurers, merchants, and money-changers hereabout clamorous against the
law" gained the retraction of the Homestead Act.

[57]Under Governor John Hugh Means, South
Carolina's defense spending and taxes went up by 50% between 1850 and 1852 to
$350,000 in preparation for secession. See Jean M. Flynn, The Militia in Antebellum South
Carolina (Spartenberg: Reprint Co., 1991), pp. 16, 141; Gregorie,
History of Sumter County,
p. 161; "Militia Law of 1794," Acts
and resolutions of the General Assembly, of the state of South Carolina, passed
in April, 1794 (Charleston: Timothy & Mason, 1794); Thomas M.
Cooper & David J. McCord (eds.), The
Statutes at Large of South Carolina (11 vols., Columbia: A. S.
Johnson, 1836-1873); John H. Franklin, The
Militant South: 1800-1861 (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press,
1956).

[60]McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds, pp. 284-285, 288, 294. When secession
finally did come in the 1860s, it was from the top down. There was little
debate or voting and vigilantism against those who opposed the war. See Channing,
Crisis of Fear, p. 292.

[61]Sumter Watchman
(1855), quoted by Gregorie, History of Sumter
County, p. 202.

[63]Bill Cecil-Fronsman, Common Whites: Class and Culture in
North Carolina (Lexington, Ky.: University Press of Kentucky,
1992), pp. 102-103.

[64]"Estate of Charity Stafford,"
Bundle 132, no. 2. A worker could make 100 yards of homespun cloth (worth
$.08/yd) in a winter. In "Dorcas Brown v. U.S.A.: A Petition to Recover
Losses Incurred during Potter's Raid," (Columbia: South Carolina Library,
University of South Carolina, 1868), was listed the costs of homespun in the
1860s.

[66]The federal tariff on imported manufactured
goods in 1816 averaged 25% of value. It went to 33% in 1824 and 50% in 1828. It
was reduced to 20% by the late 1840s because of the opposition against it. At
the same time the cost of cotton (at the port of Charleston) dropped from
$.31/lb in 1818 to $.14/lb in 1821, to $.10/lb in 1826 and to $.08/lb in 1831.
The cost at port included the price paid to the farmer and the cost of
transportation to Charleston. The price of cotton in Sumter in 1847 was
$.10-$.12 and was down to $.5 in 1855. See Gregorie, History
of Sumter County, pp. 165, 228; William Freehling (ed.), The Nullification Era: A Documentary
Record (New York: Harper Torchbook, 1967), pp. x, xii; Gray, History of Agriculture, vol. 2, pp. 663,
666; Ford, Origins of Southern Radicalism,
p. 14.

The motto of a
manufacturer now and always, here and everywhere, is monopoly: to put down all
competition and to command exclusively every market. To compel every one to buy
at the manufacturer's prices and to sell at the manufacturer's prices. (Thomas
Cooper quoted in Freehling (ed.), The
Nullification Era, p. 22).

South Carolinian James
Hamilton, "Annals of Congress," The
Great Tariff Debate, 1820-1830 (Boston: D.C. Heath, 1953), p. 23, in April
1824 remarked on the "public spirit" of the monopolists who were
behind the tax on some 300 items:

The avarice of the
monopolists invariably approaches under the guise of public spirit. They have
public meetings and the press--more prolific than the herrings of Norway--are
all united in the alliance."

[71]See "Petition for Bankruptcy of
Charles H. Jones" (July 6, 1868), Deed
Books (SCC), Book RR, p. 545. There was a third type of homestead law that
benefited Barbary Jones' son, Charlie Jones, when he was bankrupted. Starting
in the 1780s with the Revolutionary War, labor militancy obtained enactments to
discourage imprisonment for debts of trivial amounts. First, each creditor who
prosecuted was required to pay for the support in prison of the insolvent
debtor. Second, paupers were allowed to take an oath of insolvency. Upon taking
it, they were released from prison. Third, debtors were kept in the custody of
the sheriff within "prison bounds," which were fixed by law as 350
yards in a direct line from each side of the prison walls. In 1841 prison
bounds were extended to the borders of the judicial system. At that point
imprisonment ceased, although it continued on the books. Not having to serve
time in debtor's prison made it possible for Charlie Jones and his family to get
back on their feet after their bankruptcy. See Gregorie, History of Sumter County, pp. 198, 200; David Wallace, History of South Carolina (New York:
American Historical Association, 1934), vol. 2, p. 465.

[73]See J. William Harris, Plain Folks and Gentry in a Slave Society,
White Liberty and Black Slavery in Augusta's Heartland (Middletown, Conn.:
Wesleyan University Press, 1985), p. 104. Patrick Brady in Political and Civic Life in South Carolina, p. 151, quotes a small
farmer's letter to a middle country newspaper that the failure to provide
decent transportation was hurting agriculturalists who would "as many are
doing and have done years past, be compelled to abandon the soil for situations
in other states where the effects of labor afford a more certain and profitable
return." In 1818 two-thirds of the market crops in South Carolina were
harvested within 5 miles of a river because the poor road condition. See George
Taylor, Transportation Revolution, 1815-1860
(New York: Rinehart, 1951), p. 56. When the railroad came in the 1850s,
Sumter's working class, including Barbary Jones' son, Nicklus, who was a
laborer on the railroad, fought for government regulation of rates and labor
conditions. For example, in 1853 the Sumter Methodists forced the South
Carolina Railroad Company and the Southwestern Railroad Bank to discontinue
Sunday labor "except as regards the carrying of public mail and cases of
emergency." A railroad magnate complained that "a Methodist Conference
brought stock in the South Carolina Railroad Company for the sole purpose of
intermeddling." See McElveen, Broke
by the War, p. 18.

[76]As Brady, ibid., p. 165, puts it, "without provisions for boarding (or
transportation), the free school system was only a perfunctory gesture toward
the goal." Governor Stephen Miller, a Stateburg lawyer-landlord, served as
governor in the 1820s. He did little for free public education. His children
went to a boarding school in Charleston. See Johnson and Roark, Black Masters, p. 83.

[77]Harris, Plain Folks, p. 73. John Wolfe in Jeffersonian Democracy in South Carolina (Chapel Hill, N.C.:
University of North Carolina Press, 1940), p. 175, studied the split between
Federalists and Republicans (Jeffersonians) in the South Carolina legislature
in the early part of the 19th century. He maintained that the Republicans had
"Jeffersonian principles," which translated into support for the
"free school system" and for labor in general. But the examples Wolfe
gives show that the South Carolina legislature was dominated by a
"one-class (capital), two-party system."

[78]See Klein, Unification of a Slave State,
p. 277; John Thomason, The Foundations of
the Public Schools in South Carolina (Columbia, S.C.: The State
Company, 1925), pp. 126-175.

[79]Woodville Academy was established about
1816. Among the subjects taught were Latin and Greek. See Gregorie, History of Sumter County,
p. 178. Sumterville Academy, which existed from 1837 to 1867, and which was
similar to Woodville, charged $6 per quarter per child to learn reading,
spelling and writing. The cost went to $10 per quarter for modern languages,
music, painting and needle work. See Thelma Magalis Gaston, "A History of the
Sumter Secondary Schools Prior to 1888 and Since 1935: The Sumter Academy"
(MA thesis, University of South Carolina, 1950).

[80]For daughter Sarah's and son James'
education in the 1828 winter quarter at Woodville, Charity paid $12.50 on Jan.
14, 1828. She also paid $2.90 for a private tutor named John Parbus on July 22,
1828. See "Ruben Long et al," Equity
Court Rolls (SCC), Old Series no. 441.

[81]In 1845 the children were being
instructed by John P. Cook and William Evleigh. Tuition was $6 per quarter per student.
See "Administratrix's Report of Barbary Jones" in "Estate of Eli
Jones," Bundle 113, no. 13. The tuition paid by the Jones was similar to
the $12/month ($108/year) paid by the well-documented Harris family. See Racine
(ed.), Piedmont Farmer, p. 5.
According to the 1850 census the Jones still had two children in school more
than 10 years after the father's death. They were Charlie (age 18) and Mary
(age 14).

[82]See U.S.
Census, 1870 (Sumter County, S.C.), roll 1509, p. 173; see Gregorie, History of Sumter County,
pp. 175-176. The politicians, media, clergy and educators, following the lead
of the big landowners, attached a stigma to the public schools in the same way
a stigma is now attached to those who live in public housing or receive
welfare.

[84]As early as the 1780s there was an
incorporated orphanage society in Claremont and Clarendon counties (Sumter
District). Gregorie, History of Sumter
County, p. 175. Poor houses, almshouses and work houses were common
in America from the colonial period forward. They carried on traditions of
caring for orphans and destitute families and providing work for the able
bodied which dated back even before the sixteenth-century Elizabethan poor
laws. See June Axinn, Social Welfare: A
History of the American Response to Need (New York: Harper &
Row, 1982), p. 10.

[85]Burton, In My Father's House, p. 50, discusses the South Carolina poor
relief system. Those who could work were given jobs by a superintendent who was
supported by an appropriation from the general tax. Some areas of the state had
workhouses for indigent families, but not Sumter.

[87]Landlords had used beliefs about racial
superiority since the slave system of classical antiquity to attack laboring
people of different races, languages and religions. See Ellen Wood, Class Ideology and Ancient Political
Theory: Socrates, Plato and Aristotle in Social Context (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1978), pp. 3-4, 142; Adrian Sherwin-White, Racial Prejudice in Imperial Rome
(London: Cambridge University Press, 1967), pp. vii, 2.

[89]McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds, p. 161. Francis Asbury, the first American
Methodist bishop complained in 1804 that the Baptists got the rich and the
Methodists got the slaves. See John Boles, The
Great Revival, 1787-1805: The Origins of the Southern Evangelical Mind
(Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1972), p. 169.

[90]Richard Furman, quoted in Larry Tise, Proslavery: A History of the Defense
of Slavery in America, 1701-1840 (Athens: University of Georgia
Press, 1987), p. 40. In 1803 Thomas Sumter, a landlord, donated land to Furman
in Stateburg for a Baptist church. Stateburg neighbored Providence to the west.
Furman owned 6 slaves. Both he and Sumter ran into economic problems because of
their involvement in the get-rich-quick market system. Capital (the Bank of the
State of South Carolina) was no respecter of persons. Despite being a
Revolutionary war hero and advanced in years, Sumter ended up imprisoned for
debt. See Gregorie, History of Sumter
County, p. 199; Harvey Cook (ed.), A
Biography of Richard Furman (Greenville, S.C.: Baptist
Commission, 1913), pp. 12-15; Klein, Unification
of a Slave State, pp. 263-265.

[97]Lacy Ford, "Ideology of the Old
South's Plain Folks," in Samuel Hyde, Plain
Folks of the South Revisited (Baton Rouge, La.: Louisiana State
University Press, 1997), pp. 225-226.

[98]Methodist bishop Francis Asbury accepted
donations of land and slaves from slaveowners. He ended up using his office to
keep anti-slave clergy out of the pulpit. At his suggestion the Methodist
General Conference of 1804 dropped all condemnations against slavery from the
book of discipline. See Ford, Origins of Southern
Radicalism, p. 24; Matthews, Religion
in the Old South, p. 122. In the 1840s the Methodist Episcopal Church split
over the slavery issue. The Methodist Episcopal Church, South, dominated at the
top by property, ended up apologizing for slavery. As a result, the blacks
split from it in 1865 with the establishment of the African Methodist Episcopal
Church. See Bernard Powers, Black
Charlestonians: A Social History, 1822-1885 (Fayettsville, Ark.:
University of Arkansas, 1994), pp. 195-197; Gregorie, History
of Sumter County, p. 282.

[99]James F. Jones was the oldest brother of
Eli Jones, the husband of Barbary Jones.

[109]U.S.
Census, 1850 (Sumter
County, S.C.), p. 397. Hampton Watts was also serving as the guardian of the 8
minor children of his brother, Benson Watts, who died in 1847. See "Will
of Benson Watts" (1847), Wills
(SCC), bundle 123, package 1.

[111]Between 1850 and 1860 the number of
overseers in Alabama doubled from 1,800 to 4,100. See William Scarborough, The Overseer: Plantation Management in
the Old South (Baton Rouge, La.: Louisiana State University
Press, 1966), p. 10.

[114]See Miscellaneous (Columbia, S.C.:
Department of Archives and History), vol. 2, p. 485. In 1866 the amount of the
gift which the children were entitled to was referred to as $4,300 in bonds
from the "sale of Negroes." See "Report of the
Commissioner," in "Petition for Apportionment of Funds for
Maintenance," Ex parte William Hampton Jones et al. (June 5, 1866), Equity Court Rolls
(SCC). In 1872 the gift was referred to as "the estate of his [R. L.
Jones] wife, Susan A., daughter of W. H. Watts, which is valued at
$1,100." See Guardian Files
(1872, SCC), vol. 7, no. 36.

[115]Albert Moore, Conscription and Conflict in the Confederacy (New York: Macmillan,
1924), pp. 14, 65; Harris, Plain Folks,
pp. 147, 152; Marli Weiner, Mistresses
and Slaves: Plantation Women in South Carolina (Urbana, Ill. University of
Illinois Press, 1997), 180. The Congress also enacted legislation that
restricted the amount of cotton that could be grown. This was to assure that
sufficient quantities of corn were produced to feed the population.
Nevertheless, the cost of corn went from $.50/bu in 1859 to $1/bu in 1862 to
$25/bu in 1865. See Racine (ed.), Piedmont
Farmer, p. 10; Harris, Plain Folks,
p. 162.

[116]Robert Jones was enlisted at Sullivan's
Island by Capt. R. L. Heriot for the duration of the War. He was detached at
the Palmetto Battery, C.C. Parrish from July to December, 1863. He was sick and
given a furlough from July 18, 1863 to July 25, 1863. He got $.25/day ($3.75
total) during the furlough. The last entry in his service record was May/June
1864, in which he is listed as "present." See "Service Record of
Robert L. Jones," Combined Confederate Service Records (Wash. D.C.: U.S.
Archives).

[117]The 20th S.C. Infantry spent 1862-1863 in
garrison duty protecting Charleston from federal invasion via the ocean. There
was constant low-scale fighting. In May 1864 the federals gave up their efforts
to take Charleston from the sea and withdrew their troops. The 20th Regiment
then went to Virginia, where they were immediately involved in the defense of
Richmond and Petersburg on both the north and south side of the James River. In
early August 1864 the brigade was shifted to the Shenandoah Valley where they
were only slightly engaged (at Charlestown, WV, August 26, 1864; Berryville,
Va., September 3, 1864 and September 13, 1864; and Hupp's Hill, Va., October 1,
1864). In early December 1864 the brigade returned to the Richmond area and a
month later was sent to defend their native state against Sherman. For the rest
of January and most of February, 1865 the brigade alternated between the front
lines along the Salkehatchie River and Charleston. Sherman cleverly confused
the Salkehatchie line and then forced the Southerners to abandon Charleston.
After a brief stand near Cheraw, the brigade was engaged at Averasboro, N.C.
(March 16, 1865) and Bentonville, N.C., (March 19-21, 1865). About Apr. 9, 1865
the 20th Infantry was consolidated with the 2nd (Palmetto) Regiment, S.C.
Infantry and a part of Blanchard's S.C. Reserves and formed the (New) 2nd
Regiment, S.C. Infantry. They were part of general Joe Johnston's surrender at
the Bennett House near Durham, North Carolina on April 26, 1865. On May 2, 1865
the survivors received their paroles at Greensboro, N.C. and returned home. See
U.S. War Dept., The War of the Rebellion: A
Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies
(Wash. D.C.: 1880-1901), 70 vols.

[122]See Appendix 3 for a hypothetical annual
budget of the Jones in 1870.

[123]The statement was part of a court
proceeding concerning Hampton Watts' gift. Robert Jones petitioned to have
himself appointed guardian for the children. See "Affidavit of Dr. John
Witherspoon and William E. Richardson" (1872), Guardian
Files (SCC), vol. 7, no. 36.

[124]Harry Jones then farmed the place with
his unmarried aunts and took as his wife a woman of "color." She was
a "Turk," which was a group of people of middle eastern origin who
had lived in the Providence/Dalzell area since before the Revolutionary War.

[126]George and Lucy David had lived in
Sumterville. They also had had a 527 farm and 22 slaves worth $7840 in the 1840s.The
farm was in Concord Township off what is now Boulevard Rd. (County Route 82),
which was called Plowdens Mill Rd in the nineteenth century. It was not far
from the village of Brogdan and the Black River tributaries of Davis (David)
Creek, Tear Coat Branch and Boots Branch.

[127]The U.S.
Census, 1850 (Sumter County, S.C.), p. 331, stated that George David was
"insane". In a hospital record of his daughter, Lizzie Jones, George
was described as "slightly deranged, more childish than insane." See
Elizabeth Jones, "Dept. of Mental Health Case Histories,"
(manuscript, Sept. 1886-Aug. 1888), p. 192, at South Carolina Dept. of Archives
and History, Columbia, S.C.

[128]The U.S.
Census, 1850 (Sumter County, S.C.), p. 331, listed the family as having
$1200 in real estate.

[129]The Walsh's bought the David's family
farm from the estate in 1855 for $700. This was less than it was worth. See
"Sale of Land to Thomas Walsh" (1855), Equity
Court Rolls (SCC), no. 488. In 1859 the Walshs sold the farm to
William C. Chandler for $1500. See "Deed of Thomas Walsh to William
Chandler" (Feb. 8, 1850), Deed Books
(SCC), Book Q, p. 532. After the sale the David's land, the Walshs gave up
farming and began to run a dry goods store.

[130]There was one other source of help for
the David children. On August 5, 1855 James H. Dingle and his wife Frances
Ellen Dingle conveyed a four acre tract in Sumter District to Isaac Macon
David, the third David child, because of "love and affection." It was
to be held in trust for his sisters and brothers: Lizzie Jones, Manly J.,
William Henry and George Hartwell. On George's 21st birthday in 1869 the land
was to go to Lizzie Jones for life and then to her children. See
"Plat" (1854), Deed Books
(SCC), Book PP 74.

[131]See James M. Burgess, Chronicles of St. Mary's Parish: Santee
Circuit and Williamsburg Township: 1731-1885 (Columbia, S.C.: 1888), p.
107; Clarendon County Historical Society, Report:
1968 (Sumter Co.: Wilder and Ward Printing, 1968); "Members of the
Methodist Church, South Carolina Conference, Sumter, 1832," (Historical
Society of South Carolina Archives, Wofford College, Spartenburg, S.C.). Such
groups in the nineteenth century helped provide some of the services which the
social security system now provides, such as financial aid to widows, orphans, and
retired ministers.

Bordered on the N by the
land of Robert S. Mellette, on E by Robert S. Mellette and R. J. Dick, on the S
by the Run of the Cain Savannah Swamp and on the W by John S. Bradford and
Robert S. Mellette, which was deeded by Emily S. Dargon on Jan. 24, 1860 in
Book QQ 575 and 576.

The farm was also
described in Deed Books (SCC), Book
RR, p. 674.

[133]Albert Moore, Conscription and Conflict, pp. 7, 14. One of the jobs of the South
Carolina militia was to arrest conscripts and deserters. See F. Foster Smith, Jeremiah Smith and the Confederate War
(Spartenburg, S.C.: Spartenburg Reprint Co., 1993), p. 25.

[134]E. M. Hodge enlisted into Holcome's
Legion the same day as Charlie. See "Service Record of E. M. Hodge,"
Combined Confederate Service Records (Wash. D.C.: U.S. Archives).

[136]Walsh contracted chronic bronchitis with
a deposit on the right lung during the fall and winter of 1862-1863. He was
absent in January and February 1863 due to the sickness. By the summer of 1864,
he had lost 30 pounds due to the bronchitis, was too weak to work and was given
a medical discharge.

[138]Holcombe's Legion, which in time was
placed under the command of Col. W. Pinkney Shingler, was part of Wise's
Brigade (Apr.-Sept., 1863) and Hunton's Brigade (Sept. 1863-March 1864), the
Department of Richmond, Army of Northern Virginia.

[139]Charlie was detailed as regimental forage
master. Captain Walsh's service record mentions lack of food as a big problem.
In a report to headquarters dated September 27, 1862, he complained that his
men were not getting enough to eat, only what they could forage. Lack of food
was one reason that several confederate soldiers, as Walsh noted in the same
report, "escaped to the enemy."

[140]Charlie's $12 monthly wages covered the
cost of the lot. See "Lawrence M. Brunson to Charles H. Jones" (Aug.
3, 1863), Deed Books (SCC), Book
S, p. 149, which read: "Deed for 15 acres in Sumter town bordered on W by
Main St., N by L.M. Brunson's lot, E by Road to Pocotaligo, S by land of Thomas
Hoyt, with a plat attached, recorded Feb. 1869."

[141]See U.S. War Department, The War of the Rebellion, series 1, vol.
33, p. 1232. General Robert E. Lee (1807-1870) wrote from Headquarters, Army of
Northern Virginia to James A. Seddon (1815-1880), Secretary of War, about
sending up more troops from South Carolina:

I know that the
commanders of these departments will make objections to this, but I think it
for the department to decide whether our forces are to remain scattered over
the country or to be concentrated to meet the superior forces of the enemy. I
recommend that a South Carolina regiment be formed of Holcombe Legion (five
companies) in the Department of Richmond, and four companies under Major
Whitman in Southwestern Virginia, and one of the detached companies in South
Carolina. This and one regiment from South Carolina will be added to the two
South Carolina regiments in this army to form a South Carolina brigade. I would
recommend that General Butler be sent to South Carolina to complete this
brigade and to recruit the two regiments here from the excess reported in the
regiments and companies in that state. . . I think the proposed arrangements
would bring together and make effective troops which in detached companies and
regiments are now of but little service. See U.S. War Department, The War of the Rebellion, vol. 33, p.
1118.

[142]Charlie Jones' brother-in-law, Thomas
Walsh, named his son, born July 31, 1863, Pinkney Shingler Walsh. Haskell was
from an upcountry (Abeville County) landlord family. He had been valedictorian
of his class in 1860 at South Carolina College (University of S.C. after 1866)
and had "led the college" in demonstrations for secession. After
graduation he along with his "body-servant" joined the headquarters
staff of Col. Maxcy Gregg in February, 1861. Haskell remained as Gregg's
personal secretary until his patron was killed on Dec. 14, 1862. Haskell then
set about getting himself promoted in rank. He was eventually assigned as
commander of the 7th Regiment. He maintained that he had always wanted to be a
cavalry officer and had carried a pair of spurs in his knapsack from his first
entry into the war. He wanted to achieve "great results." See Louise
H. Daly, Alexander Cheeves Haskell: The Portrait of a Man (Norwood, Mass.:
Plimpton Press, 1934), pp. 38, 49, 125-126.

[143]Haskell wrote at the time, "I find
there is bitterness and jealousy about a `new man' coming in and the old
members not getting promotion." See ibid.,
p. 126.

[147]Ibid., p. 128. Col. Shingler was later arrested
by General Hoke for failing to support the charge. But Hoke and Haskell backed
off and released Shingler. Soon after Shingler resigned from the Confederate
army. Not much later on May 29, 1864 Haskell was wounded because of his
recklessness and was out of action for a month. See ibid., p. 131; Thigpen (ed.), The
Illustrated Recollections of Potter's Raid, p. 60.

[149]Daniel Bradham (1841-1915), who lost his
arm as a result of wounds at 2nd Manassas, knew Charlie. He wrote about
Charlie's election as captain:

In the early days of the
late war Charlie Jones entered the service of his country by joining Capt.
Webb's company of the 7th Cavalry Regiment of S.C.V. By pluck and energy
equaled very few of his day, he won the rank of lieutenant in his company. See
Daniel J. Bradham, "How Charlie H. Jones Killed a Yankee Soldier and
Defied his Pursuers," Manning Times,
reprinted The Watchman and Southron
(Sumter, S.C.: Sept. 23, 1891); also reprinted in Thigpen (ed.), The Illustrated Recollections of Potter's
Raid, p. 167.

Another contemporary
wrote about Charlie, "He was well known at home and had made himself a
character in the army by his prowess and daring as an efficient scout."
See ibid., p. 83. Charlie was
officially designated lieutenant in February 1865.

[153]Daly, Alexander
Cheeves Haskell, p. 148. In Charlie's military service file is a letter of
March 6, 1865 in which Haskell stated:

This lieutenant (Charles H. Jones) was elected in
August 1864. I did not consider him as one fitted for commission and would not
allow him to go on duty until he had been examined by a Board announced by Brigade
Command. He did not feel capable of standing examination. For this and other
reasons, it was delayed. On 7 October 1864 I was wounded and disabled and
obliged to leave my company. During my absence, Charles Jones succeeded me and
went on duty without examination.

Upon my return to duty I found C. H. Jones a
lieutenant but he had been absent without leave for several weeks with a number
of men from his company. The whole business was censured by a certificate. This
was disrespectful of a cavalry officer to receive and showed him not only
ignorant but incapable of appreciating his duty. For this he has been court
martialed.

I certainly request the acceptance of his resignation
as this will render unnecessary to call upon the Boards after the company has
tried this officer but I cannot approve his application for transfer. I am
quite willing for him to go but regard it as a wrong principle.

[154]Charlie had in mind to transfer to Wade
Hampton's command. Hampton had returned to South Carolina in February, 1865 as
had General Matthew C. Butler with his division of cavalry. They wanted to help
against General Sherman. See Smith, Jeremiah Smith and the Confederate War, p.
142.

In a letter also dated March 6, 1865, one month before the
war ended, Charlie tended his resignation to General S. Cooper:

I hereby tender my
resignation for reasons of a private nature and respectfully ask a favorable
consideration thereof, and also to be allowed the privilege of joining General
Hampton's Command of Cavalry.

Very
Respectfully Yours

Your
Obt Servant

C.
H. Jones

In Charlie's service record there was a notation for
February 23, 1865, which stated that he was subject to C. M. (court martial?).
The title of the Confederate military legal code under which he was charged was
G. O. 5 Par. 23, Dept of Richmond/Elzey. The reason for the court martial in
the February 23, 1865 notation was not stated. If "subject to C.M."
meant he was tried, there is no indication that he was convicted.

Lieutenant General James Longstreet (1821-1904), who was
from Edgefield, S.C. approved Charlie's resignation on March 10, 1865. An entry
in Charlie's service record seems to indicate he was "promoted on March
16, 1865" and gave a reference, "remarks: S. O. 62, Confed. Arch.
chap. l, File No. 92, page 459." On March 12, 1865 at about the time
Charlie's resignation was accepted, the 7th Regiment was at Goochland
Courthouse. It took prisoners near Columbia and Louisa Courthouses not far from
the Rivanna River.

Charlie's resignation from the Confederate army was similar
to what the South Carolina legislature had done two month earlier. On January
4, 1865 the legislature, following the lead of the new governor, Andrew Magrath
(1864-1865), enacted a measure to separate South Carolina from the Confederacy.
The local magnates wanted to defend against William Sherman and were concerned
that the Confederate government wasgiving them little help. General R. E. Lee was upset that the South
Carolina regiments were no longer being recruited. Historian Albert Moore
commented, "At the end of the war the state authorities of South Carolina
were in virtual rebellion against the central government." See Moore, Conscription and Conflict, p. 302.

[158]William Guess, South
Carolina: Annals of Pride and Protest (New York: Harper and
Brothers, 1957), p. 244. By April 1865 South Carolina had many who were
furloughed, absent without leave or had overstayed their leave, and deserters.
See Smith, Jeremiah Smith and the Confederate War,
p. 27. See Ella Lonn, Desertion During the
Civil War (New York: Century Co., 1928), p. 51; Articles of War for the Armies of the
Confederate States, art. 52; U.S. War Department, The War of the Rebellion, ser. 1, vol.
49, pt. I, p. 1042; vol. 47, pt. III, p. 730.

Barnwell Rhett, James L.
Orr, Andrew Magrath, James Chestnut, Boyce, Colcock, William W. Gist, I. Hayse,
W. P. Miles, Myzyche, Pickens, Whitner, William L. Yancy and hundreds of others
who inaugurated this revolution are at home or in some civil office and not in
the army where they ought to be. See Kibler, Benjamin Perry, pp. 363-364.

[164]There were several versions of how
Charlie and his company escaped. The federals maintained that Charlie
surrendered, got on his horse, then shot his guard and escaped. The Confederate
version was that when the federal troops outside the Norris house told Charlie
to surrender, he refused, grabbed his horse and shot one of the federal scouts
who was aiming his gun at Charlie. See Mood, "The Recollection of Potters
Raid," pp. 89-90. For leading the defense at Manning, Charlie was
posthumously awarded the Confederate Medal of Honor in 1999 by the Sons of
Confederate Veterans and the United Daughters of the Confederacy. The ceremony
at Manning included re-enactors who fired a salute from rifle muskets. See
Denise Jones, "Finally at the Gates of Glory," Sumter
Daily Item (Dec. 14, 1999).

[165]Will Warwick, "The Destruction of
Manning," Clarendon Recorder
(October 27, 1865), reprinted in Thigpen (ed.), The Illustrated Recollections of Potter's Raid, p. 172. The federal
hostility was not lessened when they heard that some months earlier 5 local
blacks, including an old man, had been hung for arming themselves and for
shooting back when discovered. A great part of Potter's troops were black. See ibid., pp. 116, 125.

[167]See "Lien of Charles H. Jones to L.
G. Pate" (Apr. 30, 1867), Deed Books
(SCC), Book RR, p. 52 Pate's house in Sumter was next to that of Thomas Walsh,
the Jones' brother-in-law. The Jones also lived nearby. See U.S. Census, 1860 (Sumter County, S.C.),
p. 157.

[179]Kibler, Benjamin
Perry, pp. 463, 466. The 1868 constitution was ratified by a vote
of 71,000 to 27,000. The total South Carolina population in 1860 was 703,000;
Woodruff, Proceedings of the Constitutional
Convention.

[180]Sumter County elected 11 black
Republicans either to the 1868 Convention or the state legislature between 1868
and 1876. All but two had been slaves before the war. See Thomas Holt, Black Over White: Negro Political
Leadership in South Carolina During Reconstruction (Urbana, Ill.:
University of Illinois Press, 1977), pp. 228-240; Johnson and Roark, Black Masters, p. 325.

[181]The delegates to the 1868 convention
contrasted with the 169 delegates to the Secession Convention of Dec. 17, 1860.
The average delegate to the Secession Convention was worth $104,000. See Ralph
Wooster, The Secession Conventions of the South
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1962), pp. 16-18.

[182]Coghlan was born at sea. His parents died
while he was a child and he was apprenticed at age 14 to a Charleston
blacksmith. When his apprenticeship expired, he came to Stateburg to work at
the Cherryvale estate of John Frierson. While smithing at Stateburg he married
Penelope Sledge (1810-1883), who was the daughter of Daniel and Nancy (Jones)
Sledge (1789-1861). There was continuous business between the Coghlans and the
Stafford-Jones over the years. Coghlan's business partner was G. L. Jones.
Coghlan was a witness to the will of Lunsford Stafford in 1842. Lunsford
Stafford was Charity Stafford's son and Barbary Jones' brother. See "Will
of Lunsford C. Stafford" (Nov. 9, 1842), Wills (SCC), vol. 2, p. 46; Nichols, Historical Sketches of Sumter County, vol. 2, pp. 295-296;
Gregorie, History of Sumter County,
98.

[183]In 1849 Coghlan was elected president of
the Sumterville Mechanical Association. The association worked to establish and
expand industry and culture for working people in Sumter, including schools,
roads, bridges, railroads and libraries. The association was critical of the
state's landlord system that, in the 1840s, was making California look
attractive to South Carolina labor. Sumter needed industrial development, as
Coghlan commented:

Wipe off the reproach
attached to the noble old South Carolina and arose her from her Rip Van Winkle
slumbers and leave California to take care of herself. Quoted in Nichols, Historical Sketches of Sumter County,
vol. 2, p. 295.

Another office to which
Coghlan was elected was Worthy Patriarch of Sumter's National Sons of
Temperance. This organization, as reflected in the editorials which Coghlan
contributed to the Sumter Watchman,
took a negative view of idle landlords and their glorification of alcoholism,
luxury and contempt for labor. Coghlan's fellow temperance promoter and fellow
delegate at the 1868 state constitutional convention was Manuel Simeon Corley
(1823-1902). From Lexington County, S.C., he edited the South Carolina Temperance Standard (1855-1856). His opposition to
the first attempt at secession in the 1850s was strong enough that capital
attempted to expel him from the state. He served in the Confederate army during
the war and was a member of the U.S. Congress in 1868-1869. See Anonymous, Biographical Dictionary of the American
Congress (Wash. D.C.: G.P.O., 1950).

[184]Coghlan's Republican allies in county
politics were blacks such as Rev. William E. Johnson, who was later a bishop in
the African Methodist Episcopal Church, Sam Lee, J. W. Westberry, Ben Lawson,
Jack Witherspoon and Jim White. His white allies were Franklin J. Moses, Sr.
(b. 1805) and Franklin J. Moses, Jr. (b. 1840). Both were Sumter lawyers and
lived in the same block as the Coghlans. Moses, Sr. had been Sumter'sstate senator (Claremont election district)
from 1841 to 1866 and in the 1870s was a member of the state supreme court.
Moses, Jr. was speaker of the house and then beat out Republican Reuben
Tomlinson for governor (1872-1874).One
of Coghlan's jobs as Sumter sheriff in 1871 was mentioned by Johnson and Roark,
Black Masters, p. 330. See also,
Richard Zuczek, State of Rebellion:
Reconstruction in South Carolina (Columbia, S.C.: University of South
Carolina Press, 1996), p. 126.

Coghlan was less close to Governor Robert K. Scott
(1868-1872). Scott was accused of having more interest in pleasing the
Democratic magnates than in serving the laboring people who elected him. For
example, those who had held office under the Confederacy had had their civil
rights revoked. As governor, Scott wanted their rights restored. The federal
military was the basis of the Republican's power. As governor, Scott wanted the
military withdrawn. Scott had been second in command at the Freedmen's Bureau.
As governor, he wanted the bureau terminated. The 1868 Constitution did not
permit segregated schools. As governor, Scott sought to segregate the schools.
After one battle, Scott removed Coghlan from the office of Sumter County
treasurer. See Gregorie, History of
Sumter County, p. 284; Nichols, Historical
Sketches of Sumter County, vol. 2, p. 295. See Robert Current, Those Terrible Carpetbaggers: A
Re-Interpretation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 143; Peggy
Lamson, The Glorious Failure: Black
Congressman Robert B. Elliott and the Reconstruction of South Carolina (New
York: Norton, 1973), p. 72.

[189]Coghlan was worth $5,000. This included a
slave family which Coghlan's wife, Penelope, had inherited from her parents,
Daniel Sledge and Nancy Jones Sledge. See U.S.
Census, 1850Slave Schedule
(Sumter County, S.C.), p. 429; U.S.
Census, 1860 (Sumter County, S.C.), p. 177.

[190]In Georgia the white workers joined with
their black counterparts in the Union Leagues and Republican party after 1866
when the Democratic party-controlled State Supreme Court struck down a debtor
relief law. See Edmund Drago, Black Politicians
and Reconstruction in Georgia: A Splendid Failure (Athens:
University of Georgia Press, 1992), p. 30.

[191]Edmund Drago, ibid.,
p. 37, compared the class split among blacks in Georgia with the split in South
Carolina:

Like South Carolina's
black reconstructionists, Georgia's black politicians stood somewhere between
the white former ruling class and the black peasantry, but they were
undoubtedly much closer to the latter. Their origins were humble in comparison
to those of their black colleagues in South Carolina, whom Thomas Holt
described as "basically bourgeois in their origins."

[192]Lou Falkner Williams, The Great South Carolina Ku Klux Klan
Trials, 1871-1872 (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1996), p. 11.
Robert Current in Those Terrible
Carpetbaggers, p. 230, noted that laboring blacks would not vote for blacks
who identified with property. Amstead Robinson, "Beyond the Realm of
Social Consensus: New Meanings of Reconstruction for American History," Journal of American History 68 (1981),
276-297, similarly observed, "It seems clear that class tensions were the
fundamental impediment to the success of southern Republicanism." See
also, William C. Hine, "Frustration, Factionalism and Failure: Black
Political Leadership and the Republican Party in Reconstruction Charleston,
1865-1877" (Ph.D. dissertation, Kent State University, 1979), pp. 105,
107, 153.

In Sumter County black landlords like Henry Ellison and
William Ellison, Jr. voted for the Democratic Party. Prior to the war the
Ellisons had owned 83 slaves worth $100,000 and 800 acres. They lived in Stateburg,
the township that bordered Providence to the west. Sumter had 320 free blacks
in 1860. See Johnson and Roark, Black
Masters, pp. 128, 312, 326, 329. According to Thomas Holt in Black Over White, pp. 3-4, the
"bourgeois" blacks in the legislature differed from laboring blacks
in their origins and ideology. They pursued policies that were not in the
interest of the majority.

When Sumter's capitalists sought to win back power in the
state legislature in 1876, they needed a portion of the black vote. The Hampton
Democrats got that support from the black red shirts who voted Democratic.
These blacks included house servants, body servants, those willing to accept a
political office from the Democrats such as county coroner, school commissioner
or representative to the legislature and artisans such as musicians. Black
musicians and their brass bands had served in the Confederacy and provided
entertainment at the Hampton rallies in the 1876 campaign. Not unlike their
modern-day counterparts who work for consumer capitalism, the musicians and
other black red shirts were hated by black Republicans, expelled from the black
churches, and exposed to beatings, whippings and other physical and verbal
abuse. When the capitalists sought to boycott the Republicans, white and black
labor fought back with their own boycott. They refused to work for capital or
to rent land. Instead they bought land forfeited for taxes of which there was
plenty for sale cheaply. Edumnd Drago in Hurrah
for Hampton! Black Red Shirts in South Carolina During Reconstruction
(Fayettesville, Ark.: University of Arkansas Press, 1998), p. xi, has attacked
historians who ignore black class struggle, "For many American historians,
especially scholars of black history, the term community
has become a romantic construct that obscures more than it reveals." See
also ibid., pp. xiv, 8, 13-14, 49;
Alfred Williams, Hampton and His Red Shirts: South
Carolina's Deliverance in 1876 (Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries,
[1935], 1970), pp. 173, 230.

[195]Harris, Plain Folks, p. 154. The annual head tax on slaves went from
$.60/slave to $.75/slave in 1856 and to $.95/slave in 1859. The real property (ad valorem) tax went from $.50/$100
accessed value to $.60/$100 in 1856 and to $.81/$100 in 1859. This was about 5%
of the state's cotton income. See Ford, Origins
of Southern Radicalism, pp. 312-313.

[197]Wright, South Carolina, p. 190; Williams, The
Great South Carolina Ku Klux Klan Trials, p. 20 (the upcountry
landlords were desperate for labor).

[198]Simkins, The Tillman Movement, pp. 5, 8; U.S.
Census of Agriculture, 1870 (South Carolina), p. 92. According to Robert
Current in American History: A Survey
(6th ed., New York: Knopf, 1983), p. 467, emancipation led to an overall
doubling in black wealth and income (housing, clothing, food and other material
rights). In the prewar era blacks earned 22% of the profits of the plantation
system. By the end of Reconstruction, they were earning 56 percent of the
return on investment in Southern agriculture. Measured another was, the
percapita income of the former slaveowning class and their allies declined 35%.

[199]As Francis Simkins, The Tillman Movement, p. 9, commented on the gains made by labor
after the war:

Elements in the white
population that had previously been unable to compete with the planter and his
slaves used the discomfiture of the planter class to their own advantage. The
former overseer, who was experienced in the management of land and negroes,
purchased land from his former employer and went into the business of working
Negroes for his own profit. Likewise, the former "poor white,"
personally experienced in farming, added to the small farm he had inherited
from his ancestors, tracts of land which the planter sold at a sacrifice.

[200]In 1875 Videau E. Jones paid her
sister-in-law, Carolina Virginia Spann $158 for her share in the estate of
Videau's mother. The property was described as "60 acres, bounded on the
north by Joshua Myers, on the south by Cook and Jones, part of the estate of
Emily E. Spann." See Deed Books
(1875, SCC), Book U, no. 608. See also, "Deed of Videau A. Jones, James W.
Spann, et al to Mariah Spann, et al" (Feb. 4, 1879), Deed Books (SCC), Book OOO, no. 664.

[202]Solon Buck, The Granger Movement: A Study of Agricultural Organization and its
Political, Economic and Social Manifestations, 1870-1880 (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1933), Simkins, The
Tillman Movement, p. 17; Writers' Program, Works Project Administration, South Carolina, p. 61. The Grange also
organized cooperative buying and selling and fought for the regulation of
railroad freight rates. In 1877 it amalgamated with the Agricultural and
Mechanical Society.

About the same time that limits were being set on crop
loans, labor achieved another debt-related goal, the final abolition of
imprisonment for debt. This had been achieved de facto in the 1840s, but was still on the books until 1868. See
Wright, South Carolina, pp. 193; South Carolina Constitution of 1868,
Art. 1, sec. 20 in Francis Thrope (ed.), Federal
and State Constitutions (Wash. D.C.: GPO, 1909); see also, South Carolina Statutes, V, 78; VII,
231; XI, 153.

[203]South Carolina, Acts
1868-1869 (Mar. 19, 1869); Harold Woodman, New
South - New Law: The Legal Foundations of Credit and Labor Relations in the
Post-bellum Agricultural South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press, 1995), p. 78.

[204]Current, Those Terrible Carpetbaggers, p. 97. The Democratic legislature in
1866 had initially re-established the Homestead Act. The law was repealed in
1876. See Clarence Stone, Southern
Capitalists: The Ideological Leadership of an Elite, 1832-1885
(Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), p. 180.

[205]The freed slaves, following the labor
theory of value, believed they had a right to the property of the former slaveowners.
Their labor had created that property and they redistributed it to themselves
to the extent they were able. As a result of the demands of the landless whites
and blacks, a Board of Land Commissioners was established. It purchased large
estates and resold them in parcels of 25 to 100 acres to those who worked them.
The new owners were given 8 years to pay. The redistribution work of the Land
Commission in Sumter County was not great, only 454 acres. See Current, Those Terrible Carpetbaggers, p. 222;
Carol Bleser, The Promised Land: The
History of the South Carolina Land Commission (Columbia: University of
South Carolina Press, 1969), p. 167; Kibler, Benjamin Perry, p. 465; Edwards, Gendered
Strife, p. 92.

A program concerning low-country blacks began with General
William Sherman's Field Order No. 15 of January 1865. He set aside for those
who had been working it, the Sea Islands and rice fields extending from the
coast for 30 miles inland. The Freedman's Bureau, established in March 1865,
aided the blacks in legalizing the land seizures begun by the army. However,
because of federal politics, only about 1,600 of the 40,000 blacks who had
worked the land and made claims to it, got titles. Land was given only to those
who had joined the Union army or worked for it in a civilian capacity. Toward
the end of the war, black Union regiments such as Potter's, did combat in the
state. See Edward Magdol, A Right to the Land:
Essays on the Freedman's Community (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood
Pub., 1976), pp. 139-145; Current, Those
Terrible Carpetbaggers, p. 43; Leslie Schwalm, A Hard Fight for We: Women's
Transition from Slavery to Freedom in South Carolina (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1997), p. 124.

[211]Woodruff, Proceedings
of the Constitutional Convention, pp. 206, 264. One "public
service" which the legislature refused to provide was repayment of the
investment in slaves that had been lost or of the war debt. The legislature
elected in 1865 had voted to pay back the war debt. But the 1868 Convention and
legislature repudiated the debt. Labor's view was that slavery and the war were
not legitimate. The magnates should not profit. That much of the war debt by
1868 was in the hands of northern speculators, as was pointed out at the
convention, made repudiation all the easier. See ibid., p. 248; Kibler, Benjamin
Perry, p. 465.

[214]In 1870 Wm. Hampton Watts was 63 and
listed his employment as school teacher. His property was valued at $4500 and
he was living with the family of Leonard (1814-1896) and Mary Ann (Michaux)
Brown at Oswego, S.C. They were members of Bethel Methodist church in Oswego.
See U.S. Census, 1870 (Sumter County,
S.C.), roll 1509, p. 307.

[215]The 1868 Constitution did not allow for
racially segregated schools. See Woodruff, Proceedings
of the Constitutional Convention, pp. 150, 265-266, 691-693, 706,
724, 901. Schooling was often channeled through the churches. Thirty-five
percent of the teachers were employees of the Freedmen's Bureau. See Eric
Anderson and Alfred Moss (eds.), Facts of
Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of John Hope Franklin (Baton
Rouge, La.: Louisiana State University Press, 1991), pp. 144, 152, 157.

The gains in education made during Reconstruction were
permanent. With a population of 4,500 in 1890 in the town of Sumter, 1,100 were
school-age (between 6 and 21 years-old). Of these, 731 were in school,
including 361 whites and 370 blacks. See Nichols, Historical Sketches of Sumter County, vol. 2, p. 431; Anonymous, Minutes of Board of Education, City Schools
(Sumter: 1890).

[216]Elmer Johnson (ed.), South Carolina: A Documentary Profile
of the Palmetto State (Columbia, S.C.: University of South
Carolina, 1971), pp. 428-429, 431.

[219]See Peter McCanless, "The Right Man
in the Right Place: J. F. Ensor and the South Carolina Lunatic Asylum,
1870-1877," South Carolina Historical Magazine,
90 (1989), pp. 218, 222, 235.

[220]In July 1886 at age 56 Lizzie Jones began
to have severe pains in her head and eyes. She had the attention of a
"special oculist" but the pain got worse. She allegedly became
violent and attempted suicide. The family was not able to care for her at home.
Those with mental problems got better medical treatment at the state facility
than at the county poor farm. On June 9, 1887, Thomas V. Walsh, who was the
Sumter County probate judge, ordered that Lizzie be committed to the asylum.
Walsh was Lizzie's brother-in-law, neighbor and the former Civil War cavalry
comrade of Charlie Jones. The Sumter County Commissioners certified that
Lizzie's expenses be covered by public funds. According to the court papers,
Lizzie owned 100 acres of real estate with a value of $700 but with a mortgage
of $500 on it. She also owned $100 of personal property. See "In the
matter of Elizabeth M. Jones," Sumter
County Probate Court Journal (Sumter County Courthouse, Sumter,
S.C.: June 10, 1887), No. 4975, pp. 759-760; Elizabeth Jones, "Dept. of
Mental Health Case Histories," (manuscript, Sept. 1886-Aug. 1888), p. 192,
at South Carolina Dept. of Archives and History, Columbia, S.C.

[221]In 1865 there were 60 paying and 68 state
supported patients in the Asylum. By 1881 the state supported patients
outnumbered the paying patients 20 to 1 (464 free to 26 paying). See Peter
McCanless, Moonlight, Magnolias and Madness:
Insanity in South Carolina from the Colonial Period to the Progressive Era
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), p. 252.

[228]The lack of an arm did not prevent Bob
Jones from doing his share of the work at the mill and on the farm that had
belonged to Barbary Jones. He rigged a strap that attached to his stump so that
he could plow. To eat meals with one hand he used a combination fork-spoon that
he made himself.

[229]Williams, The Great South Carolina Ku Klux Klan Trials, pp. 22, 25. The
criminality of the magnates was a problem in the upcountry where a majority of
the population were white tenants and sharecroppers. Property tried to use
their economic influence plus criminality to maintain their political power. As
in the elections of 1868 and 1870, this did not work. Not only black but also
white labor voted Republican. The militia protected against criminal activity,
such as the Ku Klux Klan. See Ibid.,
p. 19.

Lou Falkner Williams noted that the Klan and the politics of
racism were established and led by capital--"men of substance,"
"our first families." The Klan functioned against white labor to keep
it from voting Republican. The Klan was not a labor organization. Landlords and
merchants, to the extent they could get their laboring tenants and debtors to
join, did it by economic coercion. See Williams, The Great South Carolina Ku
Klux Klan Trials, pp. 19, 29, 91, 93-94; Zuczek, State
of Rebellion, pp. 73, 102. The Klan leaders in South Carolina
were those like Martin Gary, who with 3,000 acres and a Harvard education, was
an upcountry lawyer, Democratic party politician and would-be railroad capitalist.
He had contempt for white labor and its preference for the Republican party. It
was from Gary's brigade that Charlie Jones resigned in March 1865 after being
denied the office to which he had been elected. See Current, Those Terrible Carpetbaggers,
pp. 228, 351, 354-355, 366.

[230]One of the Sumter merchants, John
Fereter, wrote Governor Scott that "The parties committing these outrages
were comprised at least in part by some of our first families." See
"Letter of John Fereter to Governor Robert Scott" (Nov. 9, 1869), Box
9, Folder 35, Governor Robert K. Scott Papers (Columbia, S.C.: S. C. Department
of Archives and History).

For the people of South
Carolina perpetuation of their lives beyond 1860 meant the steady and
irresistible destruction of slavery, which was the first and the last principle
of life in that society, the only conceivable pattern of essential race
control.

The Stafford-Jones'
history and that of the South Carolina majority would suggest that the first
and last principle of life was labor. Their interest was in controlling the
magnates, not the blacks.

[235]Illustrative of the tendency to minimize
were writers like D. R. Hundley. He characterized South Carolina laboring
people as lazy, illiterate, alcoholic and their beliefs as superstition. See D.
R. Hundley, Social Relations in Our
Southern States (New York: Henry B. Price, 1860), pp. 259-294.

[236]McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds, p. 83; Weiner, Mistress and Slaves, p. 193. The agricultural historian Eric Jones
has remarked on the "passion" which farming people had for their work
and for the idea that labor was the source of value and the basis of economic
progress. As they labored in the fields, they sang songs and ballads which
celebrated their crops set in straight rows, their well-kept homesteads and the
satisfaction of completing the day's labor. See Eric Jones, Seasons and Prices: The Role of
Weather in English Agricultural History (London: Allen &
Unwin, 1964), p. 7; Bruce, And They All Sang
Hallelujah, p. 27.

[237]Bolton, Poor Whites, p. 44. John C. Calhoun (1782-1850) was a U.S. senator
and vice president (1825-1832) in the administrations of John Quincy Adams and
Andrew Jackson. He led the fight to nullify the federal tariffs that protected
northern industry but drove up commodity prices and encouraged reciprocal
tariffs in Europe on South Carolina exports. See John Niven, John C. Calhoun and the Price of Union: A
Biography (Baton Rouge, La.: Louisiana State University Press, 1988).

[239]Sumter County magnate John Frierson
complained in March 1867 about the "oppression" to which his class
was being subjected:

Our country is groaning
under a load of affliction and distress unparalleled in its history, involving
not only political oppression and difficulty, social disruption and
disorganization of our industrial system, but stern, absolute and pressing want
of bread. See Gregorie, History of Sumter
County, p. 281.

[241]Ralph Wooster, The
People in Power: Courthouse and Statehouse in the Lower South, 1850-1860
(Knoxville, Tenn.: University of Tennessee Press, 1969), p. 6.

[242]Magistrate Julius Fleming remarked in
1865 that from the point of view of the blacks, it was the landlords with whom
they had difficulty, not with labor. See Zuczek, State
of Rebellion, p. 35. Similarly, from labor's view, it was
property that degraded labor, not the blacks. A meeting of white labor in
Charleston declared in 1865:

The result of the war
has elevated the working men and made labor respected. Henceforth it will not
be considered degrading to fulfill the divine command to "earn our bread
by the sweat of our brow?" See South
Carolina Leader (October 21, 1865), quoted in Powers, Black Charlestonians, 109.

The mixed-race, state
labor organization promoted class partisan-goals. At its convention on November
25, 1869 to elect delegates to the National Labor Conference, it advocated a
program that would raise wages to $1/day from $.50-$.75/day and that would give
sharecroppers one-half instead of one-third of their crop. See Lamson, The Glorious Failure,
pp. 77-78. Conversely, from the view of Charleston magnates like Emma Holmes,
who had taken refuge during the war in the middle country, the enemy was both
white and black labor, "We are in a constant state of anxiety and alarm.
Some poor whites are as much suspected as the negroes, for they are equally
active in using Yankee license to rob." See John F. Marszalek (ed.), The Diary of Miss. Emma Holmes, 1861-1866
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979), pp. 186, see also, pp.
395-439.

[245]Ibid., pp. 500-501. C. Vann Woodward in The Strange Career of Jim Crow
(New York: Oxford University Press, [1955] 1974), pp. 5, 33, 51, remarked that
the notion that the post-confederacy, 19th-century south was a well-established
society whose institutions were cherished by the people is a myth.
Disfranchisement, violence, segregation and racial bigotry in politics did not
dominate until the early 20th century.

[246]George Fredrickson, "Masters and Mudsills:
The Role of Race in the Planter Ideology of South Carolina," South Atlantic Urban Studies
2 (1978) 34-38.

[247]Kibler, Benjamin
Perry, p. 362. In a "Letter by Benjamin Perry to John B.
O'Neall" (July 20, 1862), Perry Papers, quoted in ibid.,
p. 363, Perry talked about the recruits who left for the north in July 1862:

It was distressing to
see the poor fellows taking leave of their mothers and wives and children. They
cried heartily and seemed greatly distressed. These poor men from the mountains
had nothing to do in bringing on the revolution. They opposed it with all their
ignorant strength. And now they are called forth to go and fight, be killed, or
die of disease in camp while those who urged on the contest and have property
and fortunes are safe at home and enjoying all the ease and luxuries of life.

[250]States' rights politics were no more
fundamental to the magnates than to labor. When it suited property, federal
intervention was promoted as in the assumption of the Revolutionary War debt
and pensions, restrictive bankruptcy laws, the regulation of banks, the
provision of a "stable" currency and low interest rates, Indian removal,
the tracking down of fugitive slaves, winning territory against Mexico and
Spain, protection of international agricultural trade and defense against
British aggression.

[251]Victoria Bynum, Unruly
Women: The Politics of Social and Sexual Control in the Old South
(Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), p. 7.

[253]Similar to the "no honor"
interpretation is the view which reduces history to patriarchy. Sally McMillen
maintains that antebellum men normally held the upper hand in both the public
and the domestic spheres. This was necessary, she says, because without rigid
roles, the slave system would have fallen apart. For the Stafford-Jones
parallel government, the issue was not gender but class. Capitalist men and
women were the obstacle. See Sally McMillen, Motherhood in the Old South: Pregnancy, Childbirth and Infant Rearing
(Baton Rouge, La.: Louisiana State University Press, 1990), pp. 35, 183.

[254]Appendix 1 illustrates a hypothetical
budget using data from the Stafford farm. On such a farm with four adult
workers, 40 acres (40%) were fenced and under cultivation. This acreage
expanded or contracted with the number of children or slaves available to work.
On the cultivated land 14 acres of corn were planted. The yield was 240 bushels
(20 bu./acre), half of which was consumed on the farm (20 bu./person) and the
other half sold for $87 ($.60/bu). See Gray, History of Agriculture, vol. 2, pp. 815 (yields in bu./acre of corn);
812 (cost/bu. of corn); McCurry, Masters
of Small Worlds, p. 67 (corn consumption of 20 bu./person/year); Raymond
Battaglio and John Kazal, "The Structure of Antebellum Southern
Agriculture: South Carolina, A Case Study," Agricultural History, 40 (1970), 25-37; Frank Owsley, Plain Folks of the Old South
(Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1967), p. 63 (1 bu. of corn meal/month sustained an
adult).

Nicholas Hardeman, Shucks, Shocks and Hominy Blocks: Corn as a
Way of Life in Pioneer America (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University
Press, 1981).

One of the weekly chores during much of the year was to
shuck and shell a bushel or two of corn, half of which was for grits and half
for meal. The corn was ground by handmill or taken to the mill in Providence.
From 1815 to 1850 when it was outstripped by cotton, corn was South Carolina's
most important product. See Bolton, Poor
Whites, p. 20.

Another 26 acres of the cultivated land was planted in
cotton. This yielded the $197 cotton income which the Staffords reported for
1817. The figure for the amount of acreage planted is based on the assumption
that the farm price was $.05/lb., and that 150 lbs./acre were produced, and
that each of the four adults made 1000 lbs./year (3 bales). See "Ruben
Long et al," Equity Court Rolls,
no. 441; Gray, History of Agriculture,
vol. 2, pp. 708 (cotton yields in lbs./acre); 709 (price/lb. and
poundage/person). Cotton prices fluctuated even within a single year. The
$.05/lb. figure is meant to be illustrative only and is on the conservative
side. When the price was double or triple $.05/lb., then the amount of pounds
to make the same income would be reduced or the income increased.

The uncultivated 60 acres was used as pasture for the cows
and for woodland in which the hogs fed. It was not unusual for farms to have 15
hogs, some weighing up to 300 lbs. From this came a production of 200 lbs. of
pork, a quarter of which was sold as slabs of bacon to the general store and
the rest consumed by the family. See Bolton, Poor Whites, p. 26.

[255]Ford, Origins
of Southern Radicalism, p. 310, discusses the tax system. The
annual tax on land was $.30/year/$100 of land value and $1/slave. The land on
which Charity paid taxes was valued at $700 and she had one adult slave and, in
time, some slave children.

[256]Appendix 2 illustrates a hypothetical
family budget for 1840 using data from the Jones' farm. There were three adults
engaged in agriculture according to the census that year: Barbary (age 40), her
oldest son, Ellerbe (age 13), and the "Negro boy" (aged between 10
and 24). See U.S. Census, 1840
(Sumter County, S.C.), roll 515, p. 39.

There were 20 cultivated acres. This expanded during the
1840s as more children became adults. In 1840 the farm had 10 acres of corn,
which yielded 200 bushels. See Gray, History
of Agriculture, vol. 2, pp. 815 (yields in bu./acre of corn); 812 (cost/bu.
of corn); McCurry, Masters of Small
Worlds, p. 67 (corn consumption of 20 bu./person/year). Harris, Plain Folks, p. 32. (corn consumption of
15 bu/person/year; a horse got 35 bu/yr, a mule 30 bu/yr and a milk cow 5
bu/yr).

Of the corn, 140 bu. were consumed by the family and 60 bu.
were sold for $36 ($.60/bu.). There were also 10 acres of cotton, which yielded
5 bales or $75. This figure is based on a yield of 150 lbs./acre or a 1500 lbs.
yield total, selling at $.05/lb. See Gray, History
of Agriculture, vol. 2, pp. 708 (cotton yields in lbs./acre); 709
(price/lb. and poundage/person). By way of comparison the Harris family in the
Piedmont area of South Carolina in 1860 grew 420 lbs. of cotton and sold it for
$43.26 ($.10/lb.). Their total income was $310. This included $231 from pork
sales and $36 from corn (48 bu. at $.75/lb.). See Racine (ed.), Piedmont Farmer, p. 5.